Bondi Overrode Weaponization Team in Dismissing Vaccine Case

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s abrupt order to drop charges against the Utah plastic surgeon accused of selling false Covid vaccination cards came months after Bondi’s weaponization working group cleared the case for trial.

The lead defense attorney for the doctor, Kathy Nester, said she’d referred the case to the Bondi-established team focused on reviewing politicized prosecutions. Nester said the counsel to the deputy attorney general informed her in April that the working group wouldn’t be taking action.

But five days after the trial started in Salt Lake City, Bondi took the opposite approach July 12, following growing pressure from Republican lawmakers to abandon the fraud charges due to what they claimed was Biden-era weaponization.

The decision comes as many defense lawyers have turned to Bondi’s weaponization initiative announced in February to seek relief for clients. Bondi has also faced blowback from influential people in Trump’s orbit over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

The intervention—which Bondi credited on social media to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) —came as a surprise to Nester. A former chief federal public defender in Utah, Nester said she initially asked prosecutors if they were joking when they informed her of the news Saturday morning.

Her outreach to the weaponization team earlier this year led to what she’d assumed was the final determination.

“When they said no, I gave up and started getting ready for trial,” Nester said. “I thought that was my one window to get that done, and I never contacted another person after that in the political world.”

DOJ media representatives didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

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The working group permitted Utah line prosecutors to proceed to trial without holding a meeting with Nester. She said she didn’t know who, if anyone, had read the package of materials she submitted from the docket.

Nester, whose doctor client Kirk Moore has attracted widespread support on the right for giving anti-vaccine patients saline injections, had her request rebuffed in an email from the DAG’s office that didn’t provide an explanation.

The working group’s determination came before Trump loyalist Ed Martin took over in May as head of the weaponization unit. Martin praised Bondi’s directive in a July 12 post on X. “We will stop the weaponization of govt against we the people! Thank you ⁦@AGPamBondi for leading us by ⁩ending case against Utah doctor!”

Former colleagues of the Utah federal prosecutors who’d been presenting witnesses against Moore last week defended the office’s nonpartisan credibility as conservatives were quick to attack the US attorney’s office for targeting Moore.

The lead prosecutor of Moore, Todd Bouton, is a registered Republican who clerked for a judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush.

Stew Walz, who retired in 2018 after 37 years as a federal prosecutor in Utah, said the district has always trained prosecutors to be fact driven.

“It’s highly doubtful that anybody in Main Justice, much less Marjorie Taylor Greene or Senator Lee, had access to the prosecution memo or the process that the office went through before bringing the case,” said Walz.

When told of the earlier decision by the weaponization group against interfering, Walz said, “It speaks to the idea that politics, and not the merits of the case, was the deciding factor.”

But Nester stood by her original allegation that her client was unjustly targeted for prosecution because he’d been an outspoken conservative critic of the government’s vaccination program.

“We were concerned about why this particular doctor was being targeted for federal prosecution and had some concerns that it might be related to his political activism,” she said.