Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, set the tone for a contentious oversight hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi by accusing her of weaponizing the Department of Justice and hollowing out its ranks by purging experienced career officials.

“The attorney general has systematically weaponized our nation’s leading law enforcement agency to protect President Trump and his allies and attack his opponents and sadly the American people,” Durbin said in his opening statement.

He said Bondi has “purged hundreds of career officials” who “dedicated to their careers to protecting the American people” and as a result the department “has lost literally thousands of years of law enforcement expertise.”

He hit her for disbanding the FBI’s foreign influence task force and the national cryptocurrency enforcement team “despite the growing threat of foreign election interference and the drastic rise in cryptocurrency crimes.”

He said she “forced out almost 75 percent” of the Justice Department’s civil rights division’s career attorneys while “hate crimes are on the rise” and “fired more than 100 immigration judges while the immigration case backlog is more than 3 million” cases.

He also pointed out that Bondi cut the Justice Department’s public integrity section from 30 prosecutors to two “while political corruption skyrockets.”

He vented his frustration over the dismissal of career ethics officials and said they were replaced with “inexperienced political appointees.”“You effectively shut down the office of professional responsibility, which represents misconduct by Department of Justice attorneys,” he said. “Now with these ethical guardrails out of the way, corruption is running rampant at the Department of Justice.

Durbin criticized Bondi from not recusing herself from signing off on a free jet from the Qatari royal family despite having been a registered foreign agent for Qatar in the past.

The Illinois Democrat also raised media reports that President Trump’s border czar was recorded allegedly accepting a $50,000 bag of cash in exchange for promising immigration enforcement-related to contracts and noted the Justice Department’s investigation was dropped under Bondi’s leadership.

Durbin made his comments before Bondi took her oath to testify truthfully before the Judiciary Committee and delivered her own testimony.