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us department of justice
Summer Lee Introduces Impeachment Articles Accusing Bondi of 'Breaking the Law' to Protect Trump, Target Opponents
"We live in a country where we have one reality for everyday people and another for the rich, the well-connected, and the well-protected," Lee said. "And that cannot continue to be our reality."
Mar 17, 2026
Democratic Rep. Summer Lee introduced articles of impeachment against US Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday and accused the nation's top prosecutor of “breaking the law to protect pedophiles” and prosecute President Donald Trump’s “political opponents.”
"We live in a country where we have one reality for everyday people and another for the rich, the well-connected, and the well-protected. And that cannot continue to be our reality," Lee (D-Pa.) said in a video posted to her social media on Tuesday announcing the articles.
Two of the five articles pertain to Bondi's conduct surrounding the Department of Justice's (DOJ) release of files related to the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which the DOJ has been accused of covering up to protect Trump.
One article accuses Bondi of obstruction of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena in July 2025, which required the DOJ to release the full, unredacted files to the House Oversight Committee in August as part of a congressional inquiry.
"The Department of Justice refused to adhere to the subpoena and withheld substantial evidence; evidence logs indicate that amongst the withheld evidence are FBI interviews with a survivor who accused Trump of sexual abuse," the article reads.
In February, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee announced that they were investigating the DOJ's handling of an accusation made against Trump to the FBI in 2019. A woman accused the president of having sexually assaulted her at the age of 13 in the 1980s.
Another impeachment article accuses Bondi of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA), signed into law in November, which required the DOJ to release "all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials" pertaining to the Epstein case without redacting information to protect powerful figures from embarrassment.
The DOJ missed the December 19 deadline to release the files and has since released only about 3 million pages of documents as part of its "final" trove, while millions more remain unavailable.
The pages that have been released, the article says, "were heavily redacted" to scrub the names of Trump and other powerful figures, but sensitive information about many of Epstein's victims—including identifying details and nude photographs—was released, even though the law said redacting this information was permitted.
Meanwhile, it says the DOJ "continues to withhold documents," including FBI interviews with the Trump accuser.
Three of four memos detailing the interviews with the accuser were posted to the DOJ website in March. They include the victim's graphic claims that Trump hit her after she bit his penis when he attempted to force her to perform oral sex.
Trump has denied the allegations, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has called the alleged victim "disturbed."
Approximately 37 pages of FBI records related to the accusation, including the fourth memo and pages of agent notes, remain unreleased to the public, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).
"Pam Bondi is complicit in the most egregious cover-up in American history, hiding documents that reveal a young woman reported being sexually assaulted by Donald Trump when she was just a minor," said Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), a cosponsor of Lee's impeachment articles. "Bondi’s actions are not only disgusting and wrong. They are also illegal."
Another article accuses Bondi of having "abused" the DOJ and FBI's powers in a partisan fashion—to target Trump's enemies and shield his friends from accountability. It also cites Bondi's attempts to criminalize protesters who express anti-Trump viewpoints by designating them as "domestic terrorism threats" and creating secretive lists of organizations and individuals to be targeted.
Bondi is also accused of misleading courts on several occasions—including in the cases against former FBI Director James Comey and the Salvadoran national Kilmar Ábrego García and says she presented "demonstrably false allegations in court to support baseless prosecutions against protesters."
She is also accused of perjury before Congress during her confirmation hearing, where she pledged not to politicize her office or target journalists. It also accused her of lying during last month's contentious hearing in which she claimed that there was "no evidence" in the Epstein files "that Donald Trump has committed a crime."
No US attorney general has ever been impeached by the US House, which requires a simple majority. Trump was impeached twice by a Democratic-controlled House during his first term of office, though neither resulted in a conviction in the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority.
Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had articles of impeachment filed against her in January by more than 80 cosponsors following the shooting of two US citizens by immigration agents.
Earlier this month, Noem became the highest-ranking Trump official to be fired in his second term, and earlier this week, Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees referred her to the DOJ for prosecution, also for perjury.
In addition to Ansari, Lee's impeachment articles against Bondi are cosponsored by Reps. Valerie Foushee (D-NC), Dave Min (D-Calif.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.). Previous articles of impeachment against Bondi have been introduced by Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) earlier this month.
Lee emphasized that while Bondi "deserves to be held accountable," this "is also about what we want our government to be, and who we want it to work for."
"This is our chance to get justice," Lee said, "to hold people accountable who, time and again, have gotten away with screwing us over."
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In Latest Blow to Trump's Mass Deportation Plan, Judge Blocks Overhaul of Immigration Appeals
"Without this decision, countless immigrants with valid claims would have been hurriedly deported to dangerous conditions, forsaking due process for efficiency," said an immigrant rights advocate who sued the federal government.
Mar 10, 2026
Immigrant rights advocates on Monday hailed a federal judge's ruling that blocked significant portions of President Donald Trump's proposed policy changes regarding the Board of Immigration Appeals, which had been scheduled to go into effect this week and would have "eviscerated noncitizens’ right to appeal decisions in their immigration cases," according to rights groups.
In the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Randolph Moss issued a late-night order on Sunday calling Trump's rule titled “Appellate Procedures for the Board of Immigration Appeals,” which was proposed last month, “a fast-track mechanism for disposing of the vast majority” of immigration court appeals.
The proposed rule would have reduced the time immigrants have to file appeals from 30 days to just 10 days; required summary dismissal of appeals unless a majority of the Board of Immigration Appeals' (BIA) 15 permanent members voted to accept the case for review within 10 days; and permitted case dismissals before records were transmitted to the board.
Moss said the administration had violated the legal requirement for the government to notify the public of its proposed changes to a federal rule and provide an opportunity for public comment. The Trump administration could potentially try again to change the immigration appeals process.
Laura St. John, legal director for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, said the ruling "keeps in place a basic, yet critical, protection for immigrants facing removal: the ability to appeal their case."
"Allowing the Trump administration’s reckless proposal to block immigrants from a fair opportunity for review of bad decisions would have resulted in people being returned to danger and families unjustly separated, all to serve a racist mass deportation agenda."
"As the administration continues to try to deport as many people as they can quickly and often without a fair day in court, it is critical for everyone to have the opportunity to file an appeal," said St. John. "Without this decision, countless immigrants with valid claims would have been hurriedly deported to dangerous conditions, forsaking due process for efficiency.”
The Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project is one of several groups that sued the administration over the proposed rule, with Democracy Forward, the American Immigration Council, and the National Immigrant Justice Center representing the plaintiffs.
St. John argued in court that it can take at least a week for advocacy groups to prepare materials and file an appeal to the BIA after it has determined a noncitizen can be deported. Forcing immigrants and their legal teams to file an appeal within 10 days would leave many without any "meaningful review" of their cases, St. John said.
While the Executive Office for Immigration Review claimed the new policy would swiftly reduce the backlog of cases before the BIA, Moss wrote in his opinion, the plaintiffs argued that the provisions would "operate in combination to deprive almost all affected parties of the administrative appellate review 'that they were previously entitled to.'"
Erez Reuveni, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, said the decision "makes it clear that the Trump-Vance administration cannot play games with the immigration appeals system to eliminate basic due process and fast-track deportations."
Reuveni is a former Department of Justice lawyer who revealed in a whistleblower complaint last year that DOJ staffers had been advised by the Trump administration to ignore court orders in order to swiftly carry out Trump's mass deportation agenda.
“Once again, no matter how hard this administration tries to hide its cruel and unlawful actions behind an ‘immigration policy,’ a federal court has made clear that the government must follow the law and cannot strip people of their basic rights," he said. "We will continue representing our plaintiffs in court to defend their rights and hold this administration accountable.”
The Department of Homeland Security has not regularly disclosed the number of people it is deporting under the Trump administration; internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data showed last year that more than 10,000 people were being deported per month.
Moss' ruling came less than a month after US District Judge Sunshine Sykes in the Central District of California threw out a BIA decision that endorsed the administration's policy of denying bond hearings to immigrants with no criminal records who have been detained. A federal appeals court issued a temporary pause on that ruling last Friday after the White House appealed.
Mary Georgevich, a senior litigation attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center, said Moss' ruling was "an important win in the face of an administration that is intent on dismantling our immigration system at any cost, including betraying our country’s shared values of the importance of due process and access to counsel."
"Allowing the Trump administration’s reckless proposal to block immigrants from a fair opportunity for review of bad decisions would have resulted in people being returned to danger and families unjustly separated," she said, "all to serve a racist mass deportation agenda."
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‘While No One’s Looking,’ Trump DOJ Settles Antitrust Case With Live Nation-Ticketmaster
"This settlement is the clearest sign yet that this administration serves big business, not the people."
Mar 09, 2026
The Trump Justice Department on Monday reportedly reached a tentative deal with Live Nation—the owner of Ticketmaster—to settle a Biden-era antitrust lawsuit that aimed to break up the company, accusing it of illegally monopolizing the live entertainment industry.
News of the settlement, which would not require a breakup of Live Nation, came days after the trial began, with a lawyer for the Trump Justice Department's decimated antitrust division saying last week that the company abuses its market power and earns its massive profits "through illegal action." The antitrust division's counsel in the case, David Dahlquist, was apparently not made aware of the settlement until he appeared in court Monday morning.
Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said it is "highly unorthodox for the Justice Department’s lead litigator to be left out of the loop on the settlement and highly prejudicial to the jury’s deliberations."
“According to every observer, this trial was already going well for the Justice Department and states," said Hepner. "They had just won summary judgment and a jury had already heard evidence of Live Nation’s longstanding pattern of retaliation against venues who had attempted to open the market to competition. State AGs are once again left to clean up the mess left by this Administration’s incompetence.”
Under the settlement, which must be approved by a judge, Live Nation "would pay a fine of up to $280 million and divest itself of at least 13 amphitheaters across the country as it opens up its ticketing processes so that competitors can share in the sale of tickets," the Associated Press reported.
The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), a trade group representing thousands of independent live entertainment venues, festivals, and promoters, noted in a statement that the reported $280 million settlement amount "is the equivalent of four days of [Live Nation's] 2025 revenue, which means they could potentially make it back by this Friday."
"The reported settlement does not appear to include any specific and explicit protections for fans, artists, or independent venues and festivals," said Stephen Parker, NIVA's executive director. "Reported details also indicate that ticket resale platforms could be further empowered through new requirements for Ticketmaster to host their listings, which would likely exacerbate the price gouging potential for predatory resellers and the platforms that serve them."
"If these facts are true," Parker added, "NIVA views this as a failure of the justice system."
And Trump pardons Ticketmaster while no one’s looking. pic.twitter.com/ZEFcSomb05
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 9, 2026
The antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation was filed in 2024 after a nearly two-year investigation launched amid mounting public outrage aimed at Ticketmaster, spurred in part by its botched presale of Taylor Swift concert tickets in 2022. Then-President Joe Biden's Justice Department filed the complaint in partnership with 30 state attorneys general, most of whom vowed Monday to continue the fight without the Trump administration's support.
"For years, Live Nation has made enormous profits by exploiting its illegal monopoly and raising costs for shows," said New York Attorney General Letitia James. "My office has led a bipartisan group of attorneys general in suing Live Nation for taking advantage of fans, venues, and artists, and we are committed to holding Live Nation accountable."
The settlement deal comes weeks after Gail Slater, the former head of the Justice Department's antitrust arm, was pushed out by DOJ leadership. Prior to Slater's removal, Live Nation executives and lobbyists had reportedly been negotiating the terms of a possible settlement with senior Justice Department officials outside of the antitrust office, heightening corruption concerns.
Emily Peterson-Cassin, policy director at the Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement that "this settlement amounts to a slap on the wrist that tinkers around the edges of the real problem: Live Nation’s monopoly."
"Instead of breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, Live Nation will now get to continue forcing the vast majority of live venues to use Ticketmaster," said Peterson-Cassin. "Following the ousting of Gail Slater and the gutting of the government’s antitrust enforcement capabilities, this settlement is the clearest sign yet that this administration serves big business, not the people."
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