Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Justice Department on November 19, 2025, in Washington, DC. Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
The DOJ’s big screwups, briefly explained
Basic lawyering mistakes are impeding Trump’s agenda.
by Cameron Peters, Nov 19, 2025, 3:05 PM PST
Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Justice Department on November 19, 2025, in Washington, DC.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Cameron Peters is a staff editor at Vox.
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: It has been a bad week for President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, after basic lawyering mistakes set back the president’s agenda on two fronts.
What happened? On Tuesday, Texas’s new congressional map was struck down by a Trump-appointed judge as a racial gerrymander. That decision isn’t the final word on the case, as the Supreme Court could still weigh in — but, as my colleague Ian Millhiser reports, it’s quite possible SCOTUS will side with the lower court due to a glaring misreading of case law by Trump’s DOJ.
Subsequently, on Wednesday, we found out that Trump’s political prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey may be fundamentally flawed, thanks to procedural errors by interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan in presenting the indictment to a grand jury.
Related
- Trump’s Justice Department may have accidentally handed Democrats five House seats
- Trump’s redistricting campaign isn’t going well
What does this mean for Trump? The biggest impact could be in Texas, where the loss of the state’s new maps — part of a broader Trump redistricting campaign that already wasn’t going well — could tip the 2026 House map toward Democrats by five seats.
The DOJ’s failure in the Comey case, meanwhile, is symbolically important, if arguably less significant in the big picture. (And, to be clear, we still don’t know for sure what will happen with his case, though it had significant flaws from the start.) Trump targeted Comey as part of a fairly explicit retaliation campaign, and a self-inflicted failure would be a blow to that campaign.
Why does all of this matter? This isn’t just a story about two high-profile, embarrassing failures by the Justice Department. The DOJ is a massive, traditionally nonpartisan agency with a broad constellation of law enforcement responsibilities. The hollowing out of its career staff through layoffs, firings, resignations, and the installation of loyalists like Halligan — to the point where these kinds of failures can happen — is a real loss.
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