Maggie Haberman Says People Are ‘Sorely Mistaken’ If They Think Trump’s Aides Will Dissuade Him From Investigating Jack Smith’s Team

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said there will be no one trying to stop President-elect Donald Trump from seeking retribution against those involved in his criminal prosecutions.

On Monday, Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed the Jan. 6 criminal case against Trump at the request of Special Counsel Jack Smith, who cited Department of Justice policy barring the prosecution of a sitting president. Smith is also seeking to remove Trump’s name in an indictment in a separate case over the president-elect’s retention of government documents after leaving office.

Smith will step down as special counsel, a position he has held since Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him in November 2022 after Trump announced another White House bid.

On Monday’s edition of The Source on CNN, Kaitlan Collins aired a clip of Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general whom Trump has nominated to be U.S. attorney general.

“The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted,” she said on Fox News in 2023. “The bad ones. The investigators will be investigated because the deep state, last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated. And the house needs to be cleaned out.”

“What does Attorney General Pam Bondi do if she’s confirmed and the president calls her and says, ‘I’d like you to investigate… these prosecutors who were on Jack Smith’s team’?” Collins asked.

Haberman replied:

I think 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.

I mean, to your point, there was a lot of celebration about Matt Gaetz not being in that role anymore – and with reason. Matt Gaetz was investigated by that department and has all kinds of baggage. But it’s not as if the “I’m gonna clean this all out” vow from Pam Bondi is especially different.

There are so many unanswered questions, Kaitlan. But if the idea is that there’s lots of people around Trump and the White House who are gonna try to prevent him from doing this, I think people are sorely mistaken.

CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig responded by saying the next iteration of Trump’s DOJ will be quite different from the first.

“Jeff Sessions recused himself off Russia, and Mueller was appointed,” he noted of the DOJ’s probe into potential collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. “Nothing like that is going to happen this time, right? Pam Bondi is not gonna be taking herself off big cases. There is not going to be a special counsel investigating the administration.”

Watch above via CNN.