Brett Kavanaugh

Oct. 7 (UPI) — Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, and refused to answer questions on several topics.

Bondi declined to answer questions about the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey regarding her discussions with President Donald Trump as well as the firings of Department of Justice attorneys who worked on Jan. 6 cases and her refusal to prosecute certain cases of Trump’s allies.

Bondi also avoided questions about the files of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Trump’s alleged friendship with him. She responded that the Democrats should explain their own relationships with him, CNN reported.

Sen Richard Blumenthal, D-N.Y., said Bondi’s testimony was a new low for attorneys general.

“Her apparent strategy is to attack and conceal. Frankly, I’ve been through close to 15 of these attorney general accountability hearings, and I have never seen anything close to it in terms of the combativeness, the evasiveness and sometimes deceptiveness,” Blumenthal told reporters after leaving the hearing. “I think it is possibly a new low for attorneys general testifying before the United States Congress, and I just hope my Republican colleagues will demand more accountability than what we have seen so far.”

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., agreed with Blumenthal.

“She was fully prepared for, with specific and personal comebacks, accusing various of my colleagues, of challenging their integrity or challenging their basis for their questions in a way I’ve not ever seen,” Coons said.

The White House has already praised Bondi’s performance.

“She’s doing great,” a White House official told CNN. “Not only is the AG debunking every single bogus Democrat talking point, but she’s highlighting the Democrats’ own hypocrisy and they have no response.”

Bondi, along with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, criticized the judge in the case of Sophie Roske, the woman who planned an attack on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Roske, who called the police on herself before making contact with Kavanaugh, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the plot.

“My prosecutors did an incredible job on that case,” Bondi said. She said the Justice Department would appeal the sentence, which was 22 years below the federal guidelines and the minimum sentence prosecutors wanted. “The judge also would not refer to the defendant by his biological name,” Bondi said. Roske is transgender.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked Bondi what conversations she has had with the White House about investigations into Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Comey. Bondi again declined to answer.

“I’m not going to discuss any conversations,” Bondi said to Klobuchar, CBS News reported.

Klobuchar asked her about a Truth Social post by Trump last in which he asked Bondi why she hadn’t brought charges against Comey, Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“President Trump is the most transparent president in American history, and I don’t think he said anything that he hasn’t said for years,” Bondi said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., pressed her on whether the FBI found any pictures of Trump “with half-naked young women,” saying that Epstein was reported to have shown them around.

“You know, Sen. Whitehouse? You sit here and make salacious remarks, once again, trying to slander President Trump, left and right, when you’re the one who was taking money from one of Epstein’s closest confidants,” Bondi responded, referring to tech entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who has said he regretted his contacts with Epstein, CBS reported.

Since Bondi took over at the Justice Department, she and her team have fired prosecutors who worked on capitol riot cases and pushed out career FBI agents.

The Public Integrity Section is nearly empty now, and more than 70% of the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division are also gone, NPR reported.

In a letter Monday, nearly 300 former Justice Department employees asked the Oversight Committee to closely monitor the department.

“We call on Congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities far more vigorously. Members in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle must provide a meaningful check on the abuses we’re witnessing,” the letter said.

The letter also alleged poor treatment of staff.

“As for its treatment of its employees, the current leadership’s behavior has been appalling. … And demonizing, firing, demoting, involuntarily transferring, and directing employees to violate their ethical duties has already caused an exodus of over 5,000 of us — draining the Department of priceless institutional knowledge and expertise, and impairing its historical success in recruiting top talent. We may feel the effects of this for generations.”

Bondi said the DOJ stands by the “many terminations” in the department since Trump took office. “We stand by all of those,” she said.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in an opening statement, “What has taken place since Jan. 20, 2025, would make even President Nixon recoil.”

Durbin said Bondi has left “an enormous stain in American history.”

“It will take decades to recover,” he said.

The hearing is just two weeks after she sought and secured an indictment of Comey at the direction of the president. Democrats have said she’s weaponizing the Department of Justice, breaking with the longstanding tradition of keeping the department independent of political goals.

Comey was indicted on one count each of lying to Congress and obstructing justice for his testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020. Before the indictment, U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert refused to indict because of a lack of evidence against Comey. Trump accused him of waiting too long to indict and nearly allowing the statute of limitations to run out. Siebert resigned under pressure from the administration.

Last week, Durbin said the targeting of Trump’s political enemies is “a code-red alarm for the rule of law” in a floor speech, The Washington Post reported.

“Never in the history of our country has a president so brazenly demanded the baseless prosecution of his rivals,” he said. “And he doesn’t even try to hide it.”

But Republicans claim that Bondi’s leadership is necessary after years of what they say was politicized attacks from the Justice Department under the President Joe Biden administration.

“If the facts and the evidence support the finding that Comey lied to Congress and obstructed our work, he ought to be held accountable,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chair of the Judiciary Committee.

During her confirmation hearing, Bondi vowed that weaponization of the Justice Department is over.

“I will not politicize that office,” Bondi said at the time. “I will not target people simply because of their political affiliation.”

Sept. 8 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned a lower court’s rulings blocking federal immigration officials from conducting raids in California seen by critics as unconstitutional racial profiling.

The high court voted 6-3 in favor of lifting temporary restraining orders preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out the raids.

“This is a win for the safety of Californians and the rule of law,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement.

“DHS law enforcement will not be slowed down and will continue to arrest and remove the murderers, rapists, gang members and other criminal illegal aliens that Karen Bass continues to give safe harbor.”

Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued two restraining orders in July, saying roving patrols “indiscriminately” rounded up people without reasonable suspicion, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. She also said that ICE denied the individuals access to lawyers, a violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority on Monday, said it was reasonable to question people gathered in places seeking day work, landscaping, agriculture, construction and other types of jobs that don’t require paperwork and are therefore attractive to undocumented immigrants. He said reasonable suspicion cannot rely alone on ethnicity, but he called it a “relevant factor.”

“Under this court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote.

The three dissenters — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — agreed with civil rights activists who said that ICE’s approach of questioning people who appear to be of Hispanic origin or work in certain jobs would target many U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.

“We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low-wage job,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

The high court’s decision was swiftly rebuked by civil rights organizations, unions and Democrats.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has fought against President Donald Trump‘s raids, described the action as an “attack” that not only targeted her city, but “an attack on every person in every city in this country.”

“Today’s ruling is not only dangerous — it’s un-American and threatens the fabric of personal freedom in the U.S.,” she said in a statement on X.

The federal government raids in Los Angeles began June 6, sparking protests that prompted Trump to deploy thousands of National Guardsmen to the city.

On July 2, several people who were arrested in the operation filed a class action lawsuit against the federal government, calling on the courts to end the stop and arrests and to up hold due process and rights for immigration detainees to access to legal counsel.

Janet Murguia, president and CEO of UnidosUS, a nonpartisan nonprofit Hispanic civil rights organization, lambasted the ruling as opening the door for the federal government to indiscriminately stop and arrest minorities.

“It authorizes targeting by authorities that makes all immigrants, Hispanics and other non-White Americans, suspects simply because of the color of their skin or the language they speak. In doing so, the court has put the civil rights of every person in the United States at risk, Murguia said in a statement emailed to UPI.

“The Supreme Court, without proper review of explanation, has signaled that the administration can, with impunity, use profiling-based tactics nationwide.”

Aug. 12 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to rehear a case that will have implications on the Voting Rights Act when its next term begins in October.

The high court posted an order in the case Louisiana vs. Callais on Aug. 1, directing the parties involved to file supplemental briefs. The court heard arguments in the case in March but did not hand down a decision, setting the stage for reargument at a later date.

Louisiana vs. Callais is a case over redistricting Louisiana’s congressional map.

There are six congressional districts in Louisiana. The state legislature passed a redistricted map in 2024 that included two districts where a majority of voters are Black: District 2 and District 6, represented by Rep. Troy Carter and Rep. Cleo Fields respectively.

Fields, a Democrat from Baton Rouge, was elected to represent the second majority Black district in 2024.

About one-third of Louisiana’s population is Black, reflected in the newly-drawn congressional map.

The plaintiffs, a group of voters in Louisiana, argue that race was the prevailing consideration in redistricting, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Stuart Naifeh, manager of the Redistricting Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, argued the case in favor of the map before the Supreme Court in March. He told UPI that fair representation is at stake in this case.

“It’s not about proportional representation,” Naifeh said. “It’s about places where unless you create a district to provide an opportunity to have representatives of your choice a particular group will not have a fair opportunity to do that because of the race-infused politics that exist in those places.”

The issue at hand in Louisiana vs. Callais, according to Naifeh, is whether the redistricting map adopted in January 2024 is a remedy to a Voting Rights Act violation or if it is itself racial gerrymandering as plaintiffs claim.

“The question that they asked us to brief is somewhat general. In some ways it’s asking us to rebrief the same issue,” Naifeh said. “But then it refers to a specific section of the plaintiff’s brief where they argue, at least in Louisiana, that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can no longer be applied without violating the Constitution.”

“So you can’t draw a second majority-Black district without violating the Constitution, is the argument that they have made,” he added.

The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, represents a key victory for Civil Rights advocates. It was passed to address racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 prohibits discrimination in voting policies and procedures on the basis of race, color or minority status.

The previous version of the congressional map, drawn in 2020, included just one majority-Black district. That map was determined to have violated the Voting Rights Act because it diluted the role of Black voters in electing representatives.

Former Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed that map in 2022 but the Republican-led legislature held a special session to override his veto.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a group of voters then filed a complaint to challenge the map, arguing that it was an instance of unconstitutional gerrymandering.

A federal judge ruled in favor of the NAACP and co-plaintiffs but their ruling was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. It put enforcement of the federal judge’s decision on hold as another redistricting case was mulled by the high court Allen vs. Milligan.

The Allen vs. Milligan case was based on a congressional redistricting plan out of Alabama in which a majority of Black voters were placed into a single district, using a “race-neutral benchmark” theory and “modern computer technology” to draw its congressional map.

Plaintiffs argued that this plan, like the 2020 redistricting plan in Louisiana, violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled 5-4 in favor of Black voters in Alabama and subsequently Louisiana. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined in part by Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal judges.

In Roberts’ opinion, he noted that there is sometimes difficulty in discerning between “racial predominance” and “racial consciousness.”

“When it comes to considering race in the context of districting, we have made clear that there is a difference ‘between being aware of racial considerations and being motivated by them,'” Roberts wrote. “The former is permissible; the latter is usually not. That is because ‘[r]edistricting legislatures will — almost always be aware of racial demographics,’ but such ‘race consciousness does not lead inevitably to impermissible race discrimination.'”

Naifeh highlights Kavanaugh’s partial concurrence with the majority opinion as a key factor in redistricting cases going forward, including Louisiana vs. Callais.

Kavanaugh agreed with the minority opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas that while “race-based redistricting” may be required in some circumstances, it should not continue indefinitely.

“The authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.”

A victory for Naifeh, the NAACP and Black voters in Louisiana does not rely solely on the proposed congressional map remaining intact, Naifeh said.

“Victory, for Black voters in Louisiana in particular, is that they continue to have the opportunity to elect candidates of choice and are not shut out of having a voice in the political process on account of race, which was the situation until the state adopted this new map,” he said. “We don’t see victory as meaning the state keeps this particular map.”

Looking beyond Louisiana vs. Callais, Naifeh notes that race continues to be a “salient factor” in elections across the country. It remains a motivator in political platforms and civic engagement.

“We still have parts of this country where race is a very salient factor in elections and it’s not because of the Voting Rights Act,” Naifeh said. “Where race is still such a salient part of the electoral process we continue to need the Voting Rights Act. That’s what it was designed to address. So I worry that we will have a country where race is still such a salient part of elections and there is no remedy. The court needs to recognize that race continues to play a role in elections in many places.”