Bondi’s Obama Grand Jury: The Authoritarian Moment We’ve All Feared

Gabbard—who the month before her dramatic announcement had been in Trump’s doghouse for saying that Iran wasn’t close to nuclear capability—capped her deranged performance with a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, seeking investigation and prosecution of the members of the “treasonous conspiracy,” including Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and Obama.

And sure enough, now Bondi—who, like Gabbard, is duty-bound to be apolitical—has greenlighted the scurrilous investigation. That piled impropriety on top of impropriety. The DOJ manual—which one suspects has been run through the shredder—requires “adequate factual predicate” before convening a grand jury. It’s unethical to use it for a fishing expedition. That rule, in fact, is what prompted the resignation of the criminal chief of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, whom Ed Martin Jr., Trump’s first choice to lead the office, ordered to undertake a grand jury investigation without predication.

It’s difficult to overstate how dangerous this moment is. Using the machinery of criminal justice to pursue manufactured charges against political predecessors is the stuff of strongmen and collapsing democracies. From Putin’s endless prosecutions of opposition figures like the late Alexei Navalny to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s jailing of rivals and judges after labeling them coup plotters, to the cycles of vengeance in post-coup Egypt, this is the textbook authoritarian move. It corrodes trust in democratic transitions, chills dissent, and redefines political opposition as criminal subversion.