Pam Bondi’s ugly legacy, and what’s Rudy Giuliani up to these days?
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/4/2376231/-Pam-Bondi-s-ugly-legacy-and-what-s-Rudy-Giuliani-up-to-these-days?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_1&pm_medium=web
Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
In this week’s Injustice for All, we get to learn the latest ways in which Rudy Giuliani continues to lose. And as a well-deserved treat, President Donald Trump also scored himself a couple of extremely suboptimal outcomes in the last few days.
Couldn’t happen to a worse couple of guys.
Let’s catch up with Rudy, shall we?
Rudy Giuliani has not had a great post-2020 experience, despite being one of Trump’s staunchest soldiers.
No cabinet job, no cushy right-wing think tank sinecure, very little help with all his legal bills. A man cannot live on Presidential Medals of Freedom alone, right?
Giuliani did manage to mysteriously settle the $148 million defamation judgment brought by two Georgia election workers, but now he’s in the middle of a workplace harassment suit from his former assistant, who says she was forced to have sex with him.
A New York state court judge just denied Rudy’s attempts to make it go away. In fact, Giuliani’s arguments were so spurious that the judge disposed of all ten of them in just seven pages.
Enjoy that upcoming trial, Rudy. Maybe Trump will hold another fundraiser for your legal bills, though it looks like the last one didn’t actually net you much.
Trump meets the limits of his very special immunity
More than five years later, one lone Jan. 6 case remains, the one brought by Democratic lawmakers and Capitol police alleging that Trump violated their civil rights by inciting a riot.
This has dragged on because Trump has insisted that his magic immunity shield—thanks, Chief Justice John Roberts!—covers everything, but U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta just shut a bunch of that down.
First, Mehta declined to let the Department of Justice remove Trump as the defendant and substitute the United States itself. The administration requested that last year, essentially saying that he was acting in his official capacity as president when whipping up his violent minions.
Related | Now the scumbag Jan. 6 insurrectionists want you to pay them
Had the DOJ been able to pull this off, payment wouldn’t have come out of Trump’s pocket. Instead, it would come out of yours.
Mehta also denied Trump’s claims that his Very Special Immunity covered things like Trump, the president, calling Georgia’s secretary of state to demand him to “find” enough votes to help Trump, the candidate, overturn an election.
Mehta also relied on former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchison’s testimony about being with Trump immediately before his speech at the Ellipse, where Hutchison relayed that Trump was furious that his armed supporters weren’t being allowed into his rally.
Huh, you mean saying something like, “You know, I don't fucking care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the fucking mags away” isn’t part of a president’s official duties?
Another Trump judge gives Trump another no
Trump really wants churches—well, churches that he likes—to be able to endorse from the pulpit while still retaining their sweet, sweet tax-exempt status, but there’s a whole pesky Johnson Amendment that forbids it.
So the administration set out to change that by entering into a “consent agreement” in a sham lawsuit brought by hard-right churches and religious nonprofits, saying that they could violate the law and the government won’t take away their tax-exempt status.
Nope, said Judge J. Campbell Barker. He can’t approve a consent agreement where the underlying lawsuit itself was invalid.
Except in very narrow circumstances, you can’t sue the federal government to block it from collecting taxes, versus suing after taxes have been collected or suing because your nonprofit status was denied or revoked.
But that’s what the groups did here, and that’s not a real lawsuit. And a fake lawsuit can’t support a real consent decree, so Barker tossed the whole thing out.
It likely goes without saying that this will not be the last we’ve heard of this sort of thing, since Trump is bound and determined to make the Johnson Amendment disappear.
Well, for the right sort of people, of course.
You shouldn’t have to sue to make the government obey the Fourth Amendment
But that’s where we are these days.
Six Minnesota residents just sued the Trump administration over the Department of Homeland Security’s decision that it did not need judicial warrants to break down doors and conduct armed raids during Operation Metro Surge.
Why the fuss? During his confirmation hearing, newly minted Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that, under his tender care, DHS would no longer do such a thing. But why would anyone put their faith in Mullin, the DHS, or any other part of the Trump administration?
If it takes lawsuits to remind the government of the Fourth Amendment, fuck it, we’re doing lawsuits galore.
The American Bar Association gets to continue to bedevil the administration
If you’re not deeply embedded in conservative legal circles—and why would you ever want to be?—you’re likely not aware of the notion that the American Bar Association, which at root is just a trade organization for lawyers, is somehow the enemy of truth and freedom.
In large part, that’s because the ABA, which has had a decades-long role in assessing the qualifications of judicial nominees, kept rating Trump’s first-term nominees as unqualified, either due to temperament, lack of experience, or both.
Last May, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi told the ABA that it would no longer give the ABA what it called “special access” to judicial nominees.
Can’t rate ‘em unqualified if you can’t rate ‘em at all!
While Bondi and the DOJ could make that ABA access go away with the stroke of a pen, it isn’t proving nearly as easy to shake off the ABA’s lawsuit alleging harm from the administration’s habit of sanctioning lawyers for speech that Trump doesn’t like.
This is, of course, demonstrably true, thanks to Trump himself, who issued a flurry of executive orders last year targeting law firms that employed people he didn’t like and represented clients he didn’t like.
The administration argued that the ABA is not really alleging any actual harm, going as far as saying that, even if it had repeatedly violated the First Amendment rights of attorneys, that doesn’t hurt ABA members, all of whom are lawyers.
So weird that their argument didn’t work, right? So the ABA’s case against the administration goes forward.
Here’s the reality:
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