If the Justice Department won’t execute Trump’s orders, who’s in charge?

The wounds of Biden-era weaponization still ache. Many patriots still live with financial ruin, reputational damage, and cancellation campaigns stemming from the Biden-era Department of Justice. President Trump’s Department of Justice could do much more to make things right. It hasn’t.

Millions happily voted for Trump because he promised to de-weaponize government and restore election integrity. That mandate remains unfulfilled. He risks losing some of his strongest supporters, who may disengage on the country’s biggest fights — or sit out the midterms entirely — because they fear the cycle will repeat. We’re heading into another pivotal election season on a tilted field, without even fielding a full team.

Not everyone inside the Justice Department agrees with the president’s decision to issue these pardons — and that disagreement is showing up as deliberate drift.

Nothing illustrates this failure more clearly than the case of the 2020 contingent electors. To this day, some continue to face charges for assembling slates of electors contingent on ongoing fraud investigations or litigation in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Preparing contingent slates for congressional consideration has long existed in American politics. The attempt by the Biden administration and allied prosecutors to treat a bipartisan practice dating back more than a century as criminal conduct represents weaponization at its purest.

In November, I wrote about the president’s historic pardons for individuals charged in state court for offenses tied to the 2020 election. A presidential pardon touching state proceedings is unusual, but the reasoning was straightforward: Conduct tied to a federal election implicated constitutionally protected activity, and the state prosecutions functioned as a cat’s paw for a broader, coordinated campaign. President Trump made the right call — legally, prudentially, and politically. “Leave no MAGA behind” should apply most of all to the people who took the greatest risks and paid the steepest price.

What happened next — or, more to the point, what didn’t — turned “unusual” into “bizarre.”

After the president issued the pardons late on a Sunday night in November 2025, the Department of Justice went silent. Outside of comments from pardon attorney Ed Martin, the department has said virtually nothing. When reporters asked for comment, the department even referred Axios back to the White House. In Washington, that translates to “not our problem.”

It should be their problem.

RELATED: Trump’s pardons expose the left’s vast lawfare machine

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Silence is bad enough. Inaction is worse. The government should be moving aggressively to shut down the remaining state proceedings and use the pardons as a lever to defeat prosecutions that collide with federal authority and constitutional protections. We know that approach can work because it already did: Shortly after the pardons, Georgia dropped its charges against President Trump, explicitly citing the complications the pardons created.

The more uncomfortable truth is that not everyone inside the Justice Department agrees with the president’s decision to issue these pardons — and that disagreement is showing up as deliberate drift.

We’ve seen the same dynamic elsewhere: President Trump declares Biden’s autopen commutations null and void, yet the government continues releasing violent felons under those questionable pardons. Lawyers can disagree. They cannot refuse to execute the president’s lawful directives.

If the Justice Department can’t deliver even basic follow-through on the low-hanging fruit, it becomes hard to believe it will ever deliver the more challenging outcomes. Over a year into the Trump administration, we should be talking about real accountability for weaponized actors and real relief for the people they targeted.

The accountability train needs to get back on track. The first step is simple: The Department of Justice should do what the president publicly ordered it to do.