National political correspondent Maggie Haberman on Monday expressed doubts about President-elect Trump preventing the Justice Department (DOJ) from investigating prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team.
“If the idea is that if there’s lots of people around Trump and The White House who are going to prevent him from doing this, I think people are sorely mistaken,” Haberman, a CNN political analyst and reporter with the New York Times, told “The Source” host Kaitlan Collins.
Her comments come on the heels of Trump tapping former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to head DOJ after former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) withdrew from consideration. Though, some have sounded the alarm over past comments made by Bondi in 2023 calling for an investigation of prosecutors who “weaponized” the legal system against the president-elect.
“The Department of Justice — the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated because the deep state, last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows,” Bondi said at the time, during an interview on Fox News. “But now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated.”
Haberman added that she suspects that Bondi will be asked about her comments during the Senate confirmation hearing.
“I think that you can expect that Pam Bondi and everybody else who has to go through a confirmation hearing are going to be asked by the Democratic senators about those comments and it’ll be very interesting to see what she says,” Haberman told CNN.
The remarks follow the Washington Post’s report that Trump plans to fire “the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president.” The news came days before Smith and Judge Tanya Chutkan moved to dismiss Trump’s federal election interference and classified documents cases.
The president-elect also plans to create investigative teams within the DOJ to look for evidence of fraud in battleground states that could have impacted that 2020 election, according to The Post.
