Trump stocks Justice Department with personal lawyers after loyalty complaints during his first term

President Donald Trump hasn’t been attending the swearing-in ceremonies for his Cabinet officials in the last two weeks, having Vice President JD Vance and others take part in the ceremonial moments — until Wednesday, when Attorney General Pam Bondi took her oath of office.

It was a notable shift as he welcomed the new attorney general, whose confirmation process revolved mostly around whether Bondi — a Florida Republican and former member of Trump’s personal legal team — would make decisions independently from the White House.

It’s not the first time those questions came up when a president tapped a personal lawyer or ally to the Department of Justice.

The clearest precedent for choosing personal lawyers for top jobs at the Department of Justice is William French Smith, who was President Ronald Reagan’s first attorney general after serving as his estate lawyer. Perhaps no president and attorney general came into office with a stronger personal bond than when President John F. Kennedy nominated his 35-year-old brother, Robert F. Kennedy, for the post. And President Richard Nixon and John Mitchell were law firm colleagues before Mitchell ran Nixon’s 1968 campaign, served as attorney general and then resigned to run Nixon’s infamous 1972 campaign.

Now it’s Bondi, a former Florida state attorney general who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial and was involved in the legal team that sought to overturn the 2020 election. Trump also named Todd Blanche, his lead defense lawyer in the New York hush money case, who also worked on Trump’s other federal criminal cases in 2023 and 2024, to be Bondi’s deputy. Blanche’s co-counsel, Emil Bove, was named principal associate deputy attorney general and has been acting deputy attorney general while Blanche awaits confirmation. John Sauer, who successfully argued Trump’s presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court, has been tapped to serve as solicitor general, where he would argue cases before the high court.

"I think she's going to be as impartial as you can possibly be," Trump said of Bondi on Wednesday. "I know I'm supposed to say she's going to be totally impartial with respect to Democrats, and I think she will be as impartial as a person can be. I'm not sure if there's a possibility of totally, but she's going to be as total as you can get."

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who served under President George W. Bush’s administration, said whether Trump’s nominees have the “courage and fortitude to say no to the president” will determine where the Justice Department goes from here.

Gonzales, the only person ever to serve both as White House counsel and attorney general, says that having a personal relationship to the president “can be a big benefit” — as long as one has the ability to stand up to the president when necessary.

“The concern about being close to the president arises when he asks you to do something that is contrary to the interest of justice, such as whether to begin or discontinue an investigation or prosecution … then you have to have the backbone to recommend against doing something against your better judgement and explain to the president why you are recommending a course of action,” Gonzales, now the dean of Belmont University School of Law, told NBC News. “And if he continues to press you, then you have to decide whether to agree to do what the president wants against your better judgment, or decide to simply resign.”

Relationships and impartiality

NBC News spoke to several legal experts who were concerned that this group of nominees won’t have that “backbone” that Gonzales says they need.

Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama and as President Joe Biden’s personal lawyer, worries Trump thinks he has “gotten around norms and ethics of the DOJ by picking ‘my guys.’”

“Their relationship to him is entirely that of personal lawyers, lawyers in private practice who represented him, up to the inauguration, represented him on matters that are personal to him and critically important to him, and now are being put in the Department of Justice,” Bauer said, where the client won’t be Donald Trump but the United States government.

While Trump isn’t the first president to name personal lawyers to top jobs at the Justice Department, the nature of their representation does make them unique.

Blanche and Bove, in particular, defended Trump “in criminal cases brought by the incumbent party,” said John Yoo, who served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush’s administration. It gives their nominations “a much more combative, partisan flavor,” said Yoo, who said that’s partly Biden’s fault.

“There’s a big difference, I think, between just advising someone who wins the presidency on their will and trusts, versus, fighting in the criminal courtroom against the United States government itself, and the DAs in New York and Georgia,” Yoo said.

When Smith was nominated to serve under Reagan in 1981, senators pressed him on whether their relationship would affect his impartiality. Smith committed to adhering to a firm recusal policy.

“I would have to be very conscious of situations where it could appear that because of that relationship, a problem might be created,” Smith said at the time. “Certainly, if a situation arises involving the president or a member of his family or others in a sensitive situation, I would recuse myself from participating or handling any aspect which might develop out of that situation.”

Jed Shugerman, a professor of law at Boston University who has studied the history of cronyism in American politics, said that it was particularly “transgressive” to appoint one’s brother as attorney general, as John F. Kennedy did in 1961. Ultimately, he noted that Robert F. Kennedy made important achievements for federal civil rights.

And Mitchell’s close relationship with Nixon ended up playing a role in both of their downfalls in the Watergate scandal. Mitchell associates testified that he supervised the financing of the Nixon campaign’s “dirty tricks,” including the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that broke open the scandal. Mitchell went to prison, and Nixon resigned the presidency.

Leading the Justice Department

Gonzales sees Bondi as well qualified to be attorney general by virtue of experience, but told NBC News that he could not vouch for her willingness to keep the White House out of decisions relating to investigations and prosecutions if requested by the president. He emphasized that one of the most important jobs for the attorney general is defending the work and the men and women at the Department of Justice — and efforts to clear out people who worked on Jan. 6 Capitol riot cases or investigations of Trump were already underway as Bondi went through her confirmation.

Gonzales was disappointed to hear Bondi tell senators at her confirmation hearing that the “department has been weaponized for years.”

“I think it is wrong. I think it is harmful,” Gonzales said. “I think it’s harmful for career folks to hear that they have weaponized, they have politicized the Department of Justice. In an agency with over 100,000 employees some people will make mistakes or do something wrong or questionable from time to time, but to condemn an entire department is wrong.”

Bauer said that “loyalty, as defined by commitment to the president’s governing program, is perfectly appropriate,” but “absolute loyalty of a very personal kind is different.”

Yoo said that “given everything we know about Trump,” he would be “utterly shocked if he didn’t pick everyone who was loyal to him for every job.” He added that Trump might be “overcorrecting” from his first transition in 2017, when he “picked people he didn’t know and had no relationship with.”

During Trump’s first term, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation upended President Trump’s relationship with his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Sessions recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation in March 2017, leaving then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to put Mueller in charge of that probe.

Later that year, during an interview with The New York Times, Trump said, “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.”

He told NBC News in 2019 that choosing Sessions was the “biggest mistake” of his first term.

“There were several professionals under Jeff Sessions who continued on in their roles in the DOJ and that’s part of why we had the Mueller investigation,” Shugerman said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com