Conservative legal analyst and National Review columnist Andy McCarthy, who served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York during the Rudy Giuliani mayoral administration in the 1980s, denounces President Donald Trump and his new Attorney General Pam Bondi in his new column, ‘This Is Not Restoring the Way the Justice Department Is Supposed To Work.’
Note: McCarthy is hardly an anti-Trump propagandist — he is the author of the 2019 book Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, which alleged that Hillary Clinton‘s campaign and the Obama administration colluded to rig the 2016 election against Trump.
Addressing the charges brough against Trump by former DOJ special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James, McCarthy agrees with Trump and the MAGA movement “that Smith, Bragg, and James were overzealous and corruptly partisan (Fulton County DA Fani Willis, too).” Yet despite his accusations of partisanship, McCarthy also asserts that “Smith’s documents case against Trump was about real crimes!”
Note: Concerning Trump’s now-dropped Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, McCarthy wrote the June 2023 column ‘Why Trump’s ‘Witch Hunt’ Cries Ring Hollow in Face of DOJ Indictment,’ with the subhead, “Just look at the source of some of the evidence. It’s not his enemies.”
There is already abundant reason to conclude that the last thing the Trump administration intends to do is remove politics from law enforcement decisions. | @AndrewCMcCarthy https://t.co/AKi6x9tdSp
— National Review (@NRO) February 16, 2025
McCarthy contends that while the Biden administration’s DOJ was “politicized,” he also believes that “Trump engaged in serious misconduct, regardless of whether it was actionable misconduct.”
McCarthy claims that Trump’s misbehavior shouldn’t have kept him out of the White House, but says “that doesn’t mean the misbehavior didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t misbehavior.”
[McCarthy: “It does not follow that, because the [Biden] Justice Department was politicized, all of the people it targeted were pure as the driven snow.”]
McCarthy writes of Bondi: “If she is just going to spout Trump’s grievances without putting the Justice Department’s response to egregious behavior in context, then she’s engaging in partisan law enforcement, exactly the noxious practice she claims to be rooting out.”
The conservative columnist warns that Bondi’s “‘Weaponization Working Group’ Will Come Back to Haunt the Trump DOJ.”
As seen below, Bondi vowed at her Senate confirmation hearing that she “will not politicize” the office and “will not target people simply because of their political affiliation.”
Senator Whitehouse asks Pam Bondi about the weaponization of the DOJ during her confirmation hearing.
— Rarely Tolerable. (@RarelyTolerated) January 15, 2025
Whitehouse: "it would not be appropriate for a prosecutor to start with a name and look for a crime. It's a prosecutor's job to start with a crime and look for a name,… pic.twitter.com/fxmI4lhw1b
Many MAGA supporters are responding to McCarthy’s takedown of the Trump/Bondi alleged weaponization of the DOJ by suggesting that Elon Musk and his DOGE team investigate the National Review — to see if the publication has received funding from USAID or other federal coffers.
Earlier this month, Musk and the White House alleged that USAID used $8 million in taxpayers money “to subsidize subscriptions to Politico” — which ostensibly resulted in more favorable media coverage for the bureaucracy.
A closer look at the DOGE revelation showed a less nefarious situation: many government offices pay for access to the Politico Pro data service, which lawmakers — including MAGA politicians like Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) — subscribed to as a tool to help them do their jobs.
Were Musk to go looking for money passing between the federal checkbook and McCarthy’s publisher, it is a very good bet he will find that multiple GOP congress members subscribe to the National Review, which in pre-MAGA times was known as the “conservative bible.”
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