When then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton happened to meet on the tarmac in Phoenix, they said they exchanged pleasantries about life, family and Brexit. The June 2016 chat, which continued on her plane, lasted about half an hour.

Back then, it was long enough to create a scandal, an inappropriate breach, condemned by Republicans and Democrats alike.

There was the timing, in the middle of an FBI investigation of eventual Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails.

And there was the breaking of a post-Watergate tradition: keeping the Justice Department independent, free from influence and pressure from any official, past or present. That Lynch’s boss, President Barack Obama, didn’t weigh in was further proof of that practice.

The corruption that ran through Richard Nixon’s White House taught everyone a lesson, it was thought.

Think again.

The MAGA universe that railed against “weaponization” of the Justice Department during President Joe Biden’s time in office is now instilling it as policy.

Don’t believe me?

Just listen to Todd Blanche, President Trump’s former defense attorney, auditioning to replace ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi while, for now, he’s acting in her place. Bondi reportedly displeased her boss, who never hid his passion for revenge, by failing to successfully prosecute his enemies.

And in his first press conference in the new job, Blanche made it clear he’s fine with Trump continuing his vendettas.

“We have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now, and it is true that some of them involve men, women and entities that the president in the past has had issues with and that he believes should be investigated,” Blanche said, as reported in The Washington Post.

“That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that.”

Blanche also said that if he is not the president’s choice as attorney general and is asked to take another job, that’s fine with him. “I will say, ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir.’”

Now that’s downright embarrassing.

The Justice Department has been transformed from a place where accomplished, well-educated lawyers vied to earn a coveted spot into a place where the best are purged and replaced by people willing to sign up for an agenda set by the guy at the top.

It apparently never occurred to the rubber stamps in the current Department of Justice that perhaps it wasn’t a failure of effort but the flimsiness of the charges — along with the resolve and good sense of judges and grand juries — that made the legal attacks on Trump’s self-proclaimed enemies a waste of time and taxpayers’ money.

There was collateral damage, including the smearing of reputations and the need for high-profile targets, such as former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, to hire their own lawyers.

Paying a price were FBI agents, prosecutors and civil servants purged for duty-bound involvement — however tangential —in any investigation of Trump or for the “crime” of being too “woke,” the all-purpose word that’s come to mean anything or anyone the administration dislikes.

American citizens also lost, and will continue to lose, and not just in the amount of their hard-earned money squandered. Under Bondi, the Department of Justice shut down pending criminal cases and declined to prosecute many more, as reported in ProPublica.

“In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases,” the analysis said.

One closed case, an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse, seems pretty important to me — and the patients, I would imagine.

It’s all about priorities.

This version of making America great or even safe may not make sense, but it will certainly continue as long as there is no accountability.

That’s something else that’s been lost.

In 2016, as has been debated since, Comey, who has never been accused of possessing modesty, humility or a small ego, took the lead, clearing Hillary Clinton of criminal wrongdoing in a press conference while nevertheless criticizing Clinton and her staff for being “extremely careless in handling very sensitive, highly classified information.”

And when, 11 days before the 2016 election between Clinton and Trump, he informed Congress that the FBI was again looking into “her emails” and use of a private email server, several experienced prosecutors and Clinton’s team cried foul.

But because of that day on the tarmac, Loretta Lynch felt she could not overrule the decision made by Comey, the man who worked for her, no matter how much she believed it violated Justice Department protocol.

“Discussions were had at the highest levels of the department. My views were made known, they were communicated to him,” Lynch told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I think we’re all going to be looking at that for a long time.”

That was 2016.

Ten years later, things have changed.

There will be little reflection on decisions made, no pushback from the majority of congressional Republicans on the blatantly partisan words of Todd Blanche or criticism of the qualifications of the next candidate for attorney general.

And as for “weaponization,” there is no doubt whose thumb will be pressed on the scales held high by that lady with the blindfold.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call