Pam Bondi’s Power Play
Donald
Trump now has the Attorney General he always wanted—an ally willing to harness
the law to enable his agenda.
By Ruth Marcus
August
18, 2025
Bondi, one former official said, is turning the Justice Department into
“a pure and unfiltered tool of politics and revenge.
It is rare for an
Attorney General of the United States to venture into the offices of the
Justice Department’s National Security Division. Up two floors and down a
hallway the length of a city block from the A.G.’s fifth-floor suite, the
division is a high-security area; visitors must deposit their cellphones in a
cabinet before they enter and are required to punch in a code at the door. At
about 1 p.m.on
February 10th, just a few days after she was sworn in as the nation’s
eighty-seventh Attorney General, Pam Bondi arrived at the division, accompanied
by her security detail. A secretary stepped into the office of the division’s
acting chief, Devin DeBacker. “Were you expecting the Attorney General?” she
asked. DeBacker hurried out and saw Bondi. She was holding framed portraits of
leaders of the prior Administration—President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala
Harris, and Bondi’s predecessor, Merrick Garland. For the past four years, the
portraits had hung on the wall, and the facilities staff hadn’t yet got around
to removing them. Bondi, furious, did the job herself. “Don’t you people
realize who won the election?” she demanded. DeBacker had served in the White
House counsel’s office during Donald Trump’s first Administration and was about
to be named the senior deputy of the division. Instead, hours after Bondi’s
appearance, he was informed that he was being demoted. The offending portraits
were cited as the cause.
A more conventional
Attorney General might have minimized the encounter for fear of seeming petty
or punitive. Bondi bragged about it on Fox News, in an interview with the
President’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who hosts a show on the network.
“Someone didn’t tell them that there’s a new President,” Trump said to Bondi as
the pair strolled down the West Wing colonnade. “I did,” Bondi replied. To
Bondi and her allies, the outdated portraits offered proof that the department
was riddled with suspect personnel seething at the election results. “This is
the same National Security Division that was responsible for a lot of the
underpinnings of the prosecution against the President,” Bondi’s chief of
staff, Chad Mizelle, told me. “The idea that it was, ‘Oh, sorry, mere
oversight’—I mean, come on, we’re not stupid.”
During the past six
months, Bondi has presided over the most convulsive transition of power in the
Justice Department since the Watergate era, and perhaps in the
hundred-and-fifty-five-year history of the department. No Attorney General has
been as aggressive in reversing policies or firing personnel. None has been as
willing to cede the department’s traditional independence from the White House.
In Trump’s second term—“Season 2,” Mizelle called it—“the handcuffs are taken
off,” he said. “We actually get to do everything that the President wants us to
do, everything that Pam wants us to do.”
Bondi’s Justice
Department has vigorously defended even the most extreme elements of Trump’s
agenda, including the deportation of migrants to Central American prisons and
the elimination of birthright citizenship. Bondi has embraced the President’s
most outlandishly unqualified nominees—such as Alina Habba, his choice to be
the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, who previously served as his private lawyer
and has never worked as a prosecutor—and attacked “rogue judges” who stand in
her way, filing misconduct complaints against them and urging that they step
aside from cases. Most alarming, Bondi’s Justice Department has demonstrated a
willingness to use criminal law to exact revenge against Trump’s political
enemies. Bondi has reportedly ordered up a grand-jury probe into the Obama
Administration’s analysis of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, a subject
already thoroughly investigated. Trump proclaimed himself “happy to hear” the
news, though he was perhaps not totally satisfied. Asked about Ukraine at a news
conference last week, Trump invoked Hillary Clinton’s role in the “Russia,
Russia hoax,” and, pointing at Bondi, said, “I’m looking at Pam, because I hope
something’s going to be done about it.”
Bondi’s performance has
produced almost universal outrage from Democrats, and, in private, at least,
the unhappiness crosses party lines. I spoke to officials who have served at
senior levels in every Republican Justice Department since Ronald Reagan’s, including
some who support much of Trump’s agenda. They shared criticism of Bondi that
ranged from troubled to appalled, worrying about everything from what one
former senior official called Bondi’s “ferociously sycophantic” rhetoric about
the President to the purges of career staff. Bondi, many have concluded, has
turned the Justice Department into a mere arm of the White House.
For Bondi, complaints
from Democrats and what remains of the G.O.P. establishment are of little
concern. The events of the past several weeks, however, have exposed a far
greater problem for Trump’s Attorney General: the rage of the maga right. For years, much of the movement has been
obsessed with the government’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced
financier, child sex offender, and onetime friend of Trump’s. Once Trump
returned to power, these followers were convinced, his Justice Department would
reveal the truth of various conspiracy theories involving Epstein: among them
that his death while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges was not suicide,
and that he maintained a “client list” of celebrities and politicians. But
Bondi botched the matter from the start, a misstep that threatened to turn the
President’s base against him.
Bondi’s Epstein travails
began on February 21st. Just a month into the new Administration, she appeared
on Fox News to tease disclosures about the case: “a lot of flight logs” and “a
lot of names,” she said. Asked about the famed client list, she offered, “It’s
sitting on my desk right now.” The next week, Bondi and the F.B.I. director,
Kash Patel, appeared at a White House event for conservative “influencers,”
distributing white binders labelled “Epstein Files: Phase 1.” The material
turned out to be mostly a rehash of previously released information. This not
only infuriated Epstein conspiracy theorists but also annoyed White House
officials, who hadn’t been informed of the stunt in advance. Speaking again on
Fox News the next week, she assured the network’s Sean Hannity that she had
received “a truckload of evidence,” and that Patel would produce “a detailed
report as to why all these documents and evidence had been withheld.”
That never happened.
Instead, in early July, the Justice Department issued a memo saying that there
was no client list and that it would release nothing more about Epstein. This
announcement, predictably, provoked a full-blown revolt from the right. During
a Cabinet meeting at the White House, Bondi attempted to revise her statement
about the client list. “My response was it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed,
meaning the files, along with the J.F.K., M.L.K. files, as well,” she said. The
following weekend, the conservative group Turning Point USA held an annual
conference in Bondi’s home town of Tampa, and speaker after speaker called for
her ouster. “Her days are numbered,” the conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly
predicted. “I just don’t think Pam Bondi is skilled enough to avoid making
another mistake very soon.” Congressional Republicans demanded more documents,
and Speaker Mike Johnson said, of Bondi’s comments about the client list, “She
needs to come forward and explain that to everybody.”
As the backlash grew,
Bondi seemed engaged in a frantic scramble to appease Trump and the maga movement, directing attention to other favored
targets. The Justice Department took the unusual step of confirming that it was
conducting criminal investigations into the former C.I.A. director John Brennan
and the former F.B.I. director James Comey. It fired Maurene Comey, a federal
prosecutor in Manhattan who worked on the Epstein case and who—more to the
point—is James Comey’s daughter. When Trump, citing the “ridiculous amount of
publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” instructed the Justice Department to
“produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony,” it scrambled to comply.
(Federal judges refused to unseal the testimony, with one writing that its
release would provide no new information and would only “expose as disingenuous
the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal.”) In late July,
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a surprising move for the department’s
second-ranking official, spent two days interviewing Epstein’s partner and
procurer Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a twenty-year sentence for
participating in Epstein’s sexual abuse of children.
A senior Administration official told me that Bondi’s
mistakes on Epstein reflected a broader failure among members of the
Administration to appreciate the hold that the issue has on the maga world. Many did not recognize “the almost cult around
the subject matter,” the official said, and so “she may have treated it a
little more cavalierly than if she had it to do over now.” Some Bondi
critics—perhaps engaged in wishful thinking—suggested that she had lost stature
in the Administration. “I had some conversations with some White House
officials,” Laura Loomer, the right-wing conspiracist and Trump ally, told me.
“And they told me that the President wasn’t going to fire her but that they
were going to have a conversation with her to curb back her Fox News appearances.”
(Administration officials said that this conversation didn’t occur.)
Bondi appears to have
retained the backing that matters most: Trump’s. In late July, when she seemed
at risk of losing her job over the ongoing fiasco, I asked to speak to Susie
Wiles, the President’s chief of staff. Wiles, who has known Bondi since she ran
for Florida attorney general in 2010, called that very night, and praised her
in terms I hadn’t expected: “You know, she looks like Barbie. She’s blond and
beautiful, and I think people will underestimate her because of how she looks.
But she’s got nerves of steel, and she has stood up to some withering
situations with a fair amount of grace.” About Bondi’s relationship with Trump,
Wiles was succinct. “I have a long one,” she said. “Hers is longer.”
Mike Davis, who heads
the conservative legal group Article III Project, told me, “This Epstein mess
could have been communicated better.” Still, he said, “no Republican Attorney
General has been more effective so quickly as Pam Bondi. She’s not going anywhere,
and she shouldn’t go anywhere.” The latest confirmation of her standing came
last week, when Trump, announcing a “historic action to rescue our nation’s
capital from crime,” said that he was placing the District of Columbia’s police
department under federal control and deploying National Guard troops to assist
them. Bondi, he said, would be in command. On Thursday night, she named the
head of the Drug Enforcement Administration the “emergency police
commissioner”—only to back down the next afternoon after the D.C. attorney
general sued.
If Trump is sticking
with Bondi, it may be because, as one prominent conservative lawyer and Justice
Department veteran told me, “in Pam Bondi, Donald Trump has the Attorney
General he always wanted.” Trump’s previous selections for the post were among
his greatest regrets of his first term. His initial choice for the job, the
former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the probe into the
Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia, leading to the appointment of Robert
Mueller as special prosecutor. Trump’s second pick for Attorney General,
William Barr, was loyal for a long time—until he refused to back Trump’s effort
to declare the 2020 election stolen. Assembling his Cabinet for a second term,
Trump would not tolerate any risk of subversion. He was looking for “the
opposite of Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr,” Davis told me.
Not surprisingly, Trump
balked at the establishment candidates presented to him for the post: Jay
Clayton, his first-term chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Robert
Giuffra, a chair of the venerable New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell;
and Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey. Trump turned instead to the
Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a flagrantly unsuitable choice; Trump’s private
lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, encouraged the selection. But Gaetz’s escapades—he was
under a congressional ethics investigation for sexual misconduct and drug
use—proved to be too much even for the Republican-controlled Senate. Bondi, who
had been “godmother” to Gaetz’s Australian-shepherd mix, said privately that he
was a poor choice for the job. (A Justice Department official denied this.)
As the Gaetz nomination
foundered, Trump turned to Bondi, a former prosecutor who had served two terms
as Florida’s attorney general, between 2011 and 2019. She had been the state’s
first major elected official to endorse him in 2016, announcing her backing
after her first choice, Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, withdrew from the primary
race. At the time, the state’s Republican senator, Marco Rubio, was still in
the running, deriding Trump as a “con artist.” But Adam Goodman, a political
consultant who had recruited Bondi to run for attorney general, urged her to
take the risk of supporting Trump. He seemed unlikely to win the G.O.P.
nomination, but, Goodman argued, “if he does, wow, you’ll be the first major
elected G.O.P.er from Florida at the table.” The bet, of course, succeeded.
Trump wiped out the opposition, and Bondi secured a prime-time speaking slot at
the Republican National Convention. Her address to delegates did not stint on
contempt for Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. “Lock her up,” she said,
pointing to a sign attacking Clinton. “I love that.”
In the aftermath of the
2020 election, Bondi had no compunction about echoing Trump’s stolen-election
claims, promoting what she called “evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots,”
and joining the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani at the infamous Four Seasons
Total Landscaping news conference. Trump fomenting an insurrection on January
6th did not lessen her support; in 2021, she chaired two Trump-affiliated
committees, earning more than two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Two years
later, after Trump was indicted for trying to change the outcome of the 2020
election in Georgia, Bondi told Hannity that, once Trump returned to office,
“the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones.”
In 2024, in addition to being a fixture on the campaign trail for Trump, Bondi
was an observer at his Manhattan trial relating to his hush-money payments to
the porn star Stormy Daniels. When he was convicted on thirty-four felony
counts of falsifying business records, Bondi reached a different verdict. It
was, she proclaimed, “a sad day for our justice system.”
Even before her selection as U.S. Attorney General, Bondi’s
loyalty to Trump paid off. On her federal financial-disclosure form, which she
filed this past January, she reported earning a million dollars from the
Florida lobbying firm Ballard Partners, which flourished during the Trump era,
and five hundred and twenty thousand dollars from the America First Policy
Institute, a conservative think tank central to Trump’s planning for a second
term. She received nearly three million dollars in shares of Trump Media &
Technology Group, which runs Truth Social, for consulting on a deal that took
the company public. (She promised to sell the shares as part of her ethics
agreement on entering government, and did so in April, in what she described as
a “tremendous loss.”)
On a steamy morning in
late June, I went to the Dirksen Senate Office Building to watch Bondi testify
about her department’s budget request. It was only her second congressional
appearance since her confirmation hearings, and, in addition to the usual flotilla
of Justice Department officials, she was accompanied by her husband, the
Florida private-equity investor John Wakefield. (Two early marriages ended in
divorce, and Bondi called off another wedding during her time as Florida’s
attorney general, convening guests in the Cayman Islands for a ceremony that
never occurred.) When the Oregon senator Jeff Merkley posed a mild question
about whether “foreign interests” had attended Trump’s private dinner to
promote his meme coin, Bondi shifted to high umbrage. “Senator, it is wildly
offensive that you would accuse President Trump of not protecting American
interests in our country when he is the President that has shut down our
borders, unlike Joe Biden,” she said.“You’re trying to play a gotcha question
at a budget hearing when you have murders left and right in your state, violent
crimes, and we’re doing everything we can to help your liberal state.”
Bondi’s belligerence is often on display in an even more
surprising venue: her dealings with federal judges. In one case, the U.S.
district-court judge John Bates struck down Trump’s order targeting the law
firm Jenner & Block and told the Administration to inform federal agencies
that the order was not in effect. Bondi, in a memorandum also signed by Russell
Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, blended grudging
compliance with open disrespect. “On March 28, 2025, an unelected district
court yet again invaded the policy-making and free speech prerogatives of the
executive branch, including by requiring the Attorney General and the OMB
Director to pen a letter to the head of every executive department and agency,”
the memorandum began.
Bondi and her staff have
similarly tangled with ethics officials over federal rules limiting what gifts
they are permitted to accept, seeking to keep everything from a fifa soccer ball (Trump handed it to Bondi after a
meeting) to a box of cigars from the mixed-martial-arts fighter Conor McGregor,
according to a source familiar with the discussions. “Every new Administration
needs time to adjust to ethics rules that might seem trivial,” the source said.
“What wasn’t normal was the amount of pushback that we got.” One episode
involved Bondi’s desire to sit in the President’s box at the fifa Club World Cup finals, in July, at the height of the
Epstein uproar. When department ethics officials advised that this could run
afoul of federal gift rules, the source said, Bondi’s staff responded that she
might need to be there to brief the President on security issues. The ethics
advice, according to the source, was that Bondi could enter the box to answer
questions from the President. Bondi and her husband went on to sit in the
President’s box, where he offered her his signature thumbs-up. (A department
official said that Bondi did not resist ethics advice and that the couple did
not remain for the entire game.)
Other Attorneys General have shared close—to some,
disconcertingly close—relationships with the Presidents who appointed them.
Robert F. Kennedy was his brother’s modestly qualified A.G. and consigliere at
the age of thirty-five. Eric Holder once described himself as Barack Obama’s
“wingman” and the President as “my boy.” But, even on a team of Trump
sycophants, Bondi stands out for her fawning devotion. At an early Cabinet Room
praise session, Bondi turned to Trump and said, “President, your first one hundred
days has far exceeded that of any other Presidency in this country, ever,
ever.” She proceeded to make the fantastical claim that the seizure of
twenty-two million fentanyl pills during that period “saved—are you ready for
this, media?—two hundred and fifty-eight million lives.” (The entire U.S.
population is less than three hundred and fifty million; the number of fentanyl
deaths each year is less than seventy-four thousand.) Bondi’s obedience to the
President includes matters as insignificant as ending the department’s purchase
of paper straws. A Trump executive order recognized that paper straws were
“nonfunctional, more expensive, and potentially hazardous,” she wrote to D.O.J.
staff in March. “The Department stands with the President in rejecting these
misguided efforts.”
On March 14th, Trump
announced, in effect, a new maga Justice Department in a visit to the D.O.J.’s Great
Hall. For a President to appear at the department is itself unusual: Bill
Clinton went to push his crime bill; George W. Bush spoke eight years later to
mark the renaming of the building in honor of Robert F. Kennedy. Trump
unleashed a partisan, grievance-laden diatribe against the department and other
foes which lasted for more than an hour, assailing “the lies and abuses that
have occurred within these walls,” the “Marxist prosecutors” appointed by the
Biden Administration, and “scum” such as the latest special prosecutor to
investigate him, “deranged Jack Smith.” Then he left, to the familiar strains
of his campaign anthem, the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”
The event left veterans of previous Administrations shaken.
“There’s never been a Great Hall event anything like it,” Peter Keisler, a
senior Justice Department official during the George W. Bush Administration,
and a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, told me. “It sent the
unmistakable message, not merely that there was a new sheriff in town but that
this new sheriff intended to harness law enforcement into a pure and unfiltered
tool of politics and revenge.” Shortly thereafter, a new piece of art appeared
on the walls of the Attorney General’s conference room, where Bondi’s
predecessors had displayed portraits of Attorneys General past: a large
photograph of Bondi and Trump at the Great Hall event. (Her other selections:
paintings of Washington and Lincoln, borrowed from the National Portrait
Gallery, and the official D.O.J. portrait of Robert F. Kennedy. “She is very,
very close to Bobby Kennedy,” Mizelle explained, referring to the Secretary of
Health and Human Services.)
The Justice Department
declined to make Bondi available for an interview with me, but it did arrange
sessions with several other senior officials, who offered a glimpse of the new
relationship between the D.O.J. and the White House. Mizelle, who worked at the
Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, is particularly
close to Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff. “You have one
client, and you have to represent that one client. If you don’t want to do
that, then it’s just not the place for you,” Mizelle told me. When I asked him
who the client is—the United States or the President—he rejected the premise of
the question. “I don’t see a difference between those,” he said. “I think—and I
don’t mean this as an attack on you—the very fact that you asked the question
shows the fundamental problem in how everybody has always, in the last two
decades, conceived of government. . . . The President is the
executive branch.”
Temple Terrace, Florida,
where Bondi grew up, sits at the northeastern edge of Tampa. It takes its name
from the Temple oranges that grew in what was once the world’s largest orange
grove. Bondi’s father, Joseph, was a professor of education at the University
of South Florida; her mother, Patsy Hammer, was an elementary-school teacher.
The eldest of three children, Pamela Jo Bondi received an early education in
politics from her father, a Democrat, who served as a city-council member and
then as the mayor of Temple Terrace. “The household she grew up in was one that
loved what Roosevelt did during the Depression and loved Kennedy for his
youth,” Patrick Manteiga, the publisher of Tampa’s La Gaceta newspaper,
recalled. Bondi’s father, he said, “was just a very traditional Roosevelt
Democrat.” Billy Howard, a Tampa lawyer who dated Bondi for about five years,
said that she “was extraordinarily close with her father,” who died of leukemia
in 2013. “Her father was a very passionate individual about doing the right
thing. And I think that passion for doing the right thing passed down to Pam.”
In her own telling,
Bondi is an accidental prosecutor, perhaps even an accidental lawyer. In
college—she attended the University of South Florida for three years before
graduating from the University of Florida—she imagined becoming a pediatrician.
Even after deciding to go to law school, at Stetson University, in Gulfport,
Bondi wasn’t sure of her career path. “I knew I wanted to get a law degree, but
I wasn’t certain I wanted to practice law,” she told the Florida
newspaper Business Observer. Her father pushed her, helping to
arrange an internship in the state’s attorney’s office. Bondi was hooked. She
worked on four jury trials as an intern, and was hired after graduating. “What
an ingenue!” one prosecutor wrote in notes from her job interview.
Ingénue or not, Bondi
thrived. “Pam is a vibrant, enthusiastic, good natured individual,” her
supervisor wrote in an assessment in September, 1992, a year after she joined
the office. “Her zeal and enthusiasm are evident in her case presentation. With
her effervescent personality, she gives a cohesive feeling to the work area.”
As to weaknesses, the supervisor wrote, “She needs to continue polishing her
trial skills and knowledge of the law, which comes only with experience.” Bondi
rose quickly through the office ranks, from processing misdemeanor traffic
offenses to trying serious felonies. “I always saw Pam as a career prosecutor,”
Paul Sisco, a Tampa defense lawyer who was a young prosecutor alongside Bondi,
told me. “The great majority of us were sort of counting our time until we
could get into private practice. Pam had a little bit more of a pure prosecutor
philosophy, and by that I mean she was one hundred per cent convinced that was
the correct side and she didn’t want to do anything else.”
A murder case in 2000
helped make Bondi’s career, albeit in a circuitous way. A fifteen-year-old
named Valessa Robinson was accused, along with her boyfriend, Adam Davis, and
another friend, of killing her mother. Bondi secured the death penalty for Davis
(the sentence was later reduced to life in prison); Robinson was also convicted
of murder and served thirteen years. The high-profile case helped bring Bondi
to the attention of producers and bookers at the TV networks and major cable
outlets. She was soon a legal talking head on MSNBC, CNN, and, more and more
frequently, Fox News. It was an unusual role for a local prosecutor, but Bondi
had a knack for short sentences and punchy phrasing; she emphasized key words
with the skill of a veteran correspondent. “These were all internet searches,
done on the computer that Casey Anthony used, three months before that little
girl went missing,” Bondi told CBS News, speaking about the high-profile trial
of a woman who was acquitted of killing her toddler. “So if that doesn’t give
you premeditation, I don’t know what does.”
It was through her television appearances that Bondi first
encountered the real-estate developer Donald Trump, in 2006. Trump had filed
suit against the town of Palm Beach after it fined him for flying an oversized
flag at his private club, Mar-a-Lago. Bondi, in one of her cable appearances,
spoke out in Trump’s defense. Soon afterward, as Bondi related to Lara Trump,
her assistant came in to announce, “ ‘Donald Trump’s on the phone for
you,’ and I said, ‘Donald Trump the billionaire?’ ” Trump, she recalled,
“saw me defending him, got my number somehow, called up the state attorney’s
office and just wanted to thank me.”
Bondi’s television
career was central, too, to her unexpected campaign for Florida attorney
general in 2010. Two candidates, both with statewide experience, were running
in the Republican primary. Goodman, the political consultant, spied an opening
for an outsider in the race. “I thought, Oh, my God, what about Pam Bondi?
She’s photogenic, she thinks on her feet,” he told me. Goodman called to pitch
her on the notion. An hour and a half later, she wasn’t sold, but she was
taking it seriously. She was still wavering the night before her announcement,
she later said. “I had no political aspirations whatsoever,” she told Business
Observer. “I always said if I won the lottery, I’d keep prosecuting.”
Bondi entered the race
in December, 2009, and it quickly emerged that she had been a registered
Democrat until 2000. Her explanation was that Tampa was a heavily Democratic
area and she wanted her vote to have an impact in the primaries; this was
undercut by the revelation that she had not voted in the primaries in 1984,
1986, 1988, or 1992. Florida newspapers offered an alternative explanation:
shortly before the switch, her boss, a Democrat, died and was replaced by a
Republican. “In my conversations with Pam, she never presented herself as being
a conservative, a liberal, or anything,” Manteiga, the newspaper publisher,
told me. “She was in the middle.” But Bondi was running in a Tea Party year
that favored unconventional candidates, and she benefitted from her visibility
on Fox News even as she positioned herself as the nonpolitician in the race.
“I’ve not spent my career behind a desk in Tallahassee, but on the front
lines,” she said in a debate.
Bondi endorsed the Republican program with a passion that
surprised friends and observers. “Once she jumped in, the evolution from
prosecutor to politician happened so fast and with such ideological fervor that
it jolted those who knew her,” Colleen Jenkins, a reporter for the Tampa
Bay Times (then known as the St. Petersburg Times),
wrote. “Political Pam touts herself as pro-business, pro-Second Amendment and
pro-life. She talks about Lincoln and Reagan and bedrock Republican Party
principles. She blasted the national Democratic leadership on the Sean Hannity
Show and met with ex-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin at a breakfast in
Washington, D.C. She even wears a necklace with elephants on it.” Hannity went
to Florida to campaign for Bondi; Palin provided an endorsement, as did the
anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List Candidate Fund. “There is no better woman
to defend the pro-life, pro-woman legal position,” the group’s president,
Marjorie Dannenfelser, said. Bondi won the primary with nearly thirty-eight per
cent of the vote.
To the extent that the
general election captured national attention, it was because of a St. Bernard
named Master Tank, who had been separated from his owners in the chaotic
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. Master Tank turned up at an animal
shelter, emaciated and mangy, and Bondi, whose own St. Bernard had died of
cancer days earlier, adopted the dog, whom she renamed Noah. When Master Tank’s
owners, Dorreen and Steven Couture, tracked down the dog three months later and
sought to reclaim him, Bondi refused to give him up, alleging that he had been
poorly cared for before the hurricane. The Coutures, desperate to recover the
dog for their young grandchildren, whose parents had died prior to the storm,
found a pro-bono attorney and filed suit. The attorney, Murray Silverstein,
recalled being astonished that the matter had come to litigation. “We had the
proof,” he told me. “We figured a normal, ordinary, reasonable person would
say, ‘I didn’t realize that, I’m so sorry, here is your dog back.’ ” Bondi
went so far as to argue that the Coutures were seeking the wrong dog—there was
a dispute over a missing toenail—but the judge overseeing the case rejected
that argument. A July, 2006, Tampa Bay Timesstory captured the toll
of the dispute. “Emotionally distraught, she started crying when a reporter
asked innocuous personal background questions,” Jenkins wrote of Bondi. “She
said she was sensitive to a fault.” (Other local journalists told me that Bondi
had at some point called them in tears.) On the eve of trial, Bondi agreed to a
settlement under which she would pay the dog’s food and medical bills and have
visitation rights. But, Dorreen Couture later said, Bondi stopped making the
payments after a few months and cancelled her first visitation. The custody
battle, which was covered by People and CNN, lasted sixteen
months.
From the perspective of Bondi and her supporters, the dog
drama underscored her tenacity in defense of the vulnerable and mistreated. “I
took a dog who was a walking skeleton,” she told the Tampa Bay Times,
citing a veterinarian’s conclusion that Tank/Noah had been suffering from
heartworm for years before Katrina. “There is no way I can send him back there
to die.” Democrats saw an opportunity to portray her as selfish and heartless,
willing to manipulate the legal system at the expense of grieving children. An
ad sponsored by the state Party quoted Steven Couture saying of his grandson,
“He’d wake up in the night, having nightmares that Bondi took his dog.”
The story wasn’t enough
to defeat Bondi in a Republican year. “She had more notoriety. She’s very
telegenic,” her general-election opponent, Dan Gelber, told me, using an
adjective that was ubiquitous in stories about Bondi from the time. “She had a
strong Fox News contingent, and I had a lot of very good professors from
Columbia Law School.” As Matt Gaetz told me, “She was like a cult figure with
law enforcement. She’s a beautiful blond woman. She took these tough cases, she
went to court, and won. And what Pam did was she used the platform of her
earned fame to dominate.”
Bondi, as Florida’s
attorney general—the first woman to hold the office—staked out a political
position that was undeniably conservative but not at the extreme. She brought
in a Democrat, Dave Aronberg, who had run for attorney general in the primary
and endorsed Gelber in the general election, to take on the “pill mills” that
were contributing to the state’s opioid epidemic. “When I worked for her, I
didn’t even consider her partisan,” Aronberg told me. During her second term,
Bondi hired another Democrat, Patricia Conners, as her chief deputy. Gaetz, who
worked closely with Bondi on criminal-justice issues as a member of the state
legislature, described her as “more of a tactician than an ideologue,” adding,
“She actually likes getting into the weeds of the criminal-litigation process.
And I think that gets her up more than reading old William F. Buckley articles
about the nature of conservatism.”
Bondi may not have
sought out the culture wars of the Tea Party years, but she did join them.
Continuing the work of her predecessor as attorney general, she was involved in
orchestrating Republican states’ 2012 challenge to the Affordable Care Act; she
also had Florida sign on to a separate lawsuit challenging the A.C.A.’s
requirement that religiously affiliated employers provide contraceptive
coverage. She joined fifteen other states in a Supreme Court brief backing
Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, which required police to check the
immigration status of anyone they suspected of being undocumented; Bondi
wouldn’t say whether she agreed with the law but framed it as a matter of
states’ rights.
Gay rights proved to be
a particularly thorny issue for Bondi. Florida had banned same-sex unions,
including in a 2008 constitutional amendment that defined marriage as being
between a man and a woman. As court after court struck down the amendment, Bondi
ducked disclosing her own views. She declared that “I have many, many gay
friends,” yet she kept appealing the rulings, despite mounting public criticism
of her position. The backlash intensified when her office filed a brief
asserting that “disrupting Florida’s existing marriage laws would impose
significant public harm.” Bondi eventually acknowledged that the language was
problematic—“I can tell you now I’m reading every word of every brief that’s
being written,” she told the Tampa Bay Times—and presented herself
less as an advocate than as a bureaucrat managing the issue until the U.S.
Supreme Court weighed in. “There are great people on both sides of this issue,
and all we want is finality for everyone,” she said. Critics had a different take.
“The saddest thing about Pam Bondi is how much of a shape-shifter she is,”
Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, which advocates for
L.G.B.T.Q. rights, told me. “She will cut her conscience to fit whatever suits
her ambition.”
Bondi served as
Florida’s attorney general at a time when, across the country, the role was
becoming increasingly politicized. In that landscape, the National Association
of Attorneys General tried to lessen the partisan divide. The leadership of the naagtraditionally alternated annually between Republicans and
Democrats, and rotated along regional lines. In 2013, it was the Southern
Democrats’ turn, meaning that the Mississippi attorney general, Jim Hood, was
in line for the position. Bondi mounted a last-minute challenge, not informing
Hood in advance but lining up backing—or so she thought—from her Republican
colleagues. The vote was conducted by secret ballot; two Republicans voted
against her, dooming her effort. “I like Pam Bondi. She has always been very
gracious, pleasant in her dealings with me,” Chris Toth, then the deputy
executive director of the group, told me. “But I also believe that she was more
responsible for the rise in partisanship than any single A.G. that I ever
worked with.”
Bondi’s tenure was marred by several episodes that prompted
questions about her ethics and judgment. In 2014, she asked Governor Rick Scott
to reschedule an execution; unbeknownst to Scott, the date conflicted with
Bondi’s “hometown campaign kickoff” reëlection fund-raiser. (When the reason
was reported, Bondi quickly acknowledged that she had made a mistake.) That
year, the New York Times, as part of a series on Republican
attorneys general, reported on Bondi’s close ties to a Washington law firm, the
now defunct Dickstein Shapiro, which specialized in lobbying attorneys general
on behalf of corporations. Bondi had even invited one of the firm’s lawyers to
recuperate at her Tampa home after having foot surgery. (A Bondi spokeswoman
declined to comment to the Times.) Lisa Lerman, a legal-ethics
expert at the Catholic University of America, described the relationship as
“unseemly.”
But perhaps the most
intense criticism of Bondi’s time in office involved her dealings with Donald
Trump. In 2013, Trump made a twenty-five-thousand-dollar contribution to a
political group supporting Bondi’s reëlection; the check came three days after
a Bondi spokeswoman said that her office was considering joining a fraud
lawsuit against Trump University which had been filed by the New York attorney
general. Bondi’s office decided not to pursue the case, and she continued to
welcome Trump’s financial support. In 2014, Trump, along with Giuliani,
headlined a fund-raiser for her at Mar-a-Lago.
The donation resurfaced
as an issue in 2016, after Bondi’s endorsement of Trump. Pressed by reporters,
her office acknowledged that she had personally asked Trump for the
contribution. In the end, though, the evidence pointed more to a breakdown in
procedures for vetting donations than to a quid pro quo. An outside
investigator for the Florida Commission on Ethics concluded that, though the
timing of the contribution “may raise suspicions,” there was “no evidence” that
Bondi weighed in on whether to pursue the case against Trump University. The
investigator noted that the staff lawyer who looked into the complaints against
Trump testified that he did not discuss them with Bondi and that she “was not
involved in the decision” about whether to join the lawsuit.
In 2019, shortly after her second term as attorney general
expired, Bondi joined Ballard Partners, which had opened a D.C. office the year
before to capitalize on its Trump connections. Bondi was brought on as the
chair of the firm’s new corporate-regulatory-compliance practice, but her main
role involved forging connections between Ballard clients and key officials.
“She was more of a networker than a substantive lawyer,” one person who worked
with Bondi said. Brian Ballard, the firm’s founder, disputed that
characterization. “Pam is an incredibly substantive person, so that person
doesn’t know Pam well,” he told me. Bondi reported lobbying the White House,
Congress, and federal agencies on behalf of thirty clients, many with interests
before the department that she now heads. They included blue-chip corporations
such as General Motors, Amazon, and Uber; the government of Qatar (which paid
Ballard a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars a month); and GEO Group, one of
the nation’s largest private prison companies.
One notable client of
Bondi’s was Carnival Corporation, the giant cruise operator. For years,
Carnival and other cruise lines had docked their ships in Cuba under a special
government exemption: a waiver that protected them from claims made by
companies whose properties had been seized by the Castro regime. In April,
2019, the Trump Administration, wanting to up the pressure on post-Castro Cuba,
was poised to change course and allow such lawsuits to proceed, exposing
Carnival to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential liability. The company
hired Ballard, and Carnival’s chairman, Micky Arison, secured the
highest-possible-level meeting: with the national-security adviser, John
Bolton; the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo; and Trump. The short session was
“unusual,” Bolton told me. “I think a more normal course would have been to
say, ‘Why don’t you meet with the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin
America?’ or something like that,” he said. “I heard about the meeting after it
was set up. I didn’t set it up. Pompeo didn’t set it up. We both saw eye to eye
on the substance of the thing, which was not to extend the waiver again.” He
went, he explained, because “I figured, good God, if this is going to happen,
I’d better be there.” As Bolton recalled, Arison made his case to Trump, whom
he had known for years; Bondi said little, and the Administration moved forward
with its plan to end the waiver.
According to those
involved in Bondi’s selection as Attorney General, Trump did not consider
anyone else after the collapse of the Gaetz nomination. But the President
hadn’t always been sold on her. Following his first election, the speculation
was that Bondi would secure a prominent role in the new Administration. “I
would imagine her opportunities are unlimited,” Brian Ballard, who had
represented Trump’s interests in Florida and raised money for him during the
campaign, said at the time. “There’s nobody closer to Trump in Florida than Pam
Bondi.” Trump’s daughter Ivanka pushed Bondi for the key role of White House
counsel, Maggie Haberman reported in her book “Confidence Man”; that idea went
nowhere. Rubio pitched her for Homeland Security Secretary during the first
transition and again when the position was vacated by John Kelly, in 2019.
Governor Scott also lobbied for her to get an Administration job, telling one
Trump ally, “She really wants to be in Washington.” Trump wasn’t convinced.
When Bondi’s name would come up, the Trump ally said, “he’d roll his eyes and
shake his head. I always took it as he didn’t take her seriously—he didn’t
think she was a person of substance.” (Others dispute that Bondi was seeking an
appointment—saying that, after years of government service, she preferred to
earn more money and focus on her personal life—and maintained that Trump did
not disparage her.) During the first term, the best Bondi could secure was an
appointment to Trump’s opioid commission, and, after she left state office, a
stint on the White House legal team for his first impeachment.
As Trump prepared for a
second term, Bondi was not in line for an Administration position—this time
apparently by her own choice. Then Trump made her an offer. “He picked up the
phone one morning about seven o’clock and called her and said, ‘I’ve made a dreadful
error, and would you consider this?’ ” one senior Administration official
told me. Within hours, Gaetz had withdrawn and Bondi’s selection was announced.
Gaetz told me that, shortly afterward, he called Bondi. She said that she knew
it had been a “tough week” for him and added, “Come work for me,” he recalled.
He demurred—although, he said, “I thought that was super kind of her.” Others
in the maga sphere
were more concerned by Bondi’s selection. “I was absolutely, like, We can’t do
this, right?” one prominent conservative said. “Pam’s great. She’s very
political, she’s savvy, she’s high-energy, she’s always there, she’s got a big
heart. I would never ask her any legal question at all to do with anything but
a parking ticket.”
The Attorney General is
often required to make decisions, with high stakes and on short notice, on an
array of difficult matters, from blocking mergers to approving
counterintelligence investigations to appealing cases to the Supreme Court. The
job also involves supervising a vast bureaucracy that includes the F.B.I., the
Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Bureau of
Prisons. Few have come to the job with less experience in complex federal legal
issues than Bondi. By all accounts, she was a capable prosecutor, and her
colleagues on the impeachment team praise her performance. But as Attorney
General she has fumbled basic questions. In late June, the Supreme Court handed
the Trump Administration a major victory in its effort to eliminate birthright
citizenship, ruling that, while challenges to Trump’s order worked their way
through the courts, federal judges could not fully block it from taking effect.
Bondi, appearing with Trump at a triumphant White House news conference, was asked
whether the Justice Department would enforce the edict in states where it had
not been struck down. “Birthright citizenship will be decided in October in the
next session by the Supreme Court, unless it comes down in the next few
minutes. I guess it could come down. There’s still—I think they’re still
deliberating right now on some cases,” she said. This was gibberish. The Court
had released all its rulings for the term, and it has not yet accepted a case
that directly challenges Trump’s action.
Bondi also stumbled, at
least early on, in staffing the department. By the time she took the job, the
White House had announced the other top-tier Justice appointees: Deputy
Attorney General Blanche; his top deputy, Emil Bove (who has since been
confirmed to a federal judgeship); and Solicitor General D. John Sauer. A
cannier operator, knowing that Trump needed her to step in for Gaetz, might
have insisted on appointing members of her own team; Bondi did not. She was
able to select one minor player, tapping a Florida sheriff, Chad Chronister, to
be the head of the D.E.A. But Chronister’s nomination quickly faltered when it
emerged that his department had enforced pandemic lockdown rules, arresting a
pastor in 2020 for holding a church service. “She was hasty,” a senior
Administration official said, “and just skipped a very, very important step.”
Bondi’s penchant for Fox News appearances from the West
Wing lawn helped fuel a perception that she is a figurehead Attorney General.
She was absent from one of the highest-profile matters her department has
handled: its move, in early February, to drop criminal bribery charges against
New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. Bove, who was then the acting Deputy
Attorney General, instructed Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. Attorney for
the Southern District of New York, to dismiss the case. She refused, and sought
a meeting with Bondi, to no avail. Sassoon turned to Mizelle, asking that he
print out an e-mail she had written and put it in front of the Attorney
General, according to a source familiar with the episode. Still, she heard
nothing from Bondi, and Bove accepted her resignation. A former U.S. Attorney
who served during a previous Republican Administration described Bondi’s
refusal to engage with Sassoon as extraordinary. “If a U.S. Attorney wants to
speak to the A.G., they speak to the A.G.,” this person told me. “It tells you
how removed Bondi is from actually running the department.”
Justice officials
dismiss this characterization of Bondi as inaccurate and sexist. But a
whistle-blower complaint from Erez Reuveni, a former senior immigration lawyer,
indicated that the White House is intervening heavily in the department—not
merely shaping policy but overseeing the content and the timing of legal
arguments. Reuveni described receiving an urgent call from Henry Whitaker, a
counsellor to the Attorney General, telling him that the “White House wanted
the brief filed by midnight” in one high-profile immigration case. In another
case, that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador
in March, Reuveni said that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign told
him the White House wanted to know why he had failed to argue that Abrego
Garcia was a terrorist. Reuveni replied that the evidence didn’t support that
assertion. Bondi fired him for insubordination.
Early in Trump’s first
term, the President erupted in anger over his inability to contain the
investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. “Where’s my Roy
Cohn?” he demanded, referring to his legendary personal lawyer and fixer, who
stopped at nothing to manipulate the legal system to his clients’ advantage.
Bondi is no Roy Cohn, but in her Trump has found—at long last—an ally who will
bend the department to his will and punish his perceived enemies. In seven
tumultuous months, nearly every aspect of its operations has been reshaped to
facilitate and enable his agenda.
“The transformation that
this department has gone through since January 20th, it’s something that nobody
has been able to do in the recent history of the Department of Justice, and
that’s because of the Attorney General,” Blanche told me. On the criminal side,
investigating corruption is no longer a priority. The Public Integrity Section,
which prosecutes corruption cases involving government officials, has been all
but disbanded; under an executive order, enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. companies from paying bribes overseas, has
been suspended. On the civil side, the overhaul may be even more dramatic. A
June memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate announced that
the new priorities would be denaturalization; “combatting unlawful
discriminatory practices in the private sector” (that is, going after
diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives); pursuing doctors, hospitals, and
pharmaceutical companies that provide care to transgender children; and ending
sanctuary-city protections. The Civil Rights Division has been upended, going
from a unit entrusted with protecting minority rights in voting, housing, and
education into one whose stated missions include “protecting children from
chemical and surgical mutilation,” “ending radical indoctrination in K-12
schooling,” “keeping men out of women’s sports,” and “eradicating
anti-Christian bias.”
With the shift in focus has come a cataclysmic upheaval in
personnel. Bondi is not the first Republican-appointed Attorney General to
chafe at overseeing a workforce that undoubtedly skews liberal. But no Attorney
General has been so overtly at odds with the staff she supervises. “There are a
lot of people in the F.B.I. and also in the Department of Justice who despise
Donald Trump, despise us, don’t want to be there,” Bondi told Hannity in March.
“We’re going to root them out. We will find them, and they will no longer be
employed.” Bondi spoke of the lawyers she oversees in the terms that
Administration officials use for individuals they target for deportation:
“We’re starting at every level of the Justice Department and getting rid of the
worst of the worst.”
Thousands of employees
have taken a buyout offer from the new regime. Not surprisingly, some seventy
per cent of the Civil Rights Division’s two hundred and fifty lawyers have
left, much to the apparent delight of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.
“I think that’s fine,” Dhillon told the radio host Glenn Beck in April. “The
job here is to enforce the federal civil-rights laws—not woke ideology.” Other
departures have been more damaging to the Administration. More than half the
attorneys in the Federal Programs Branch, which defends executive orders and
other Administration actions against lawsuits, have left, limiting the
department’s ability to litigate the onslaught of cases it faces. In the élite
Office of the Solicitor General, which represents the Administration before the
Supreme Court, at least half the career lawyers have resigned.
Stacey Young, who left
the D.O.J. in January and founded Justice Connection, a group that supports
department employees, estimates that two hundred staffers have been dismissed
or transferred to lesser positions. Generally, no reason is provided, in seeming
violation of civil-service laws that protect employees from being fired without
cause and without being given due process. Instead, a typical letter of
dismissal, signed by the Attorney General, invokes Article II of the United
States Constitution—the provision establishing the authority of the
President—and states, “You are removed from federal service effective
immediately.” One lawyer was fired because he failed to remove his preferred
pronouns from his e-mail signature, according to a department official, who
said that the Attorney General possesses the power to terminate employees “for
any reason or no reason whatever.”
The purge has served to intimidate those who remain in the
Justice Department, diminishing the threat of pushback. Among those dismissed
was the head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, which handles ethics
complaints against department attorneys; no one has been named to fill that
role. In late January, the Justice Department’s senior career lawyer and chief
ethics adviser, Bradley Weinsheimer, was removed as Associate Deputy Attorney
General, a position to which he was appointed during the first Trump
Administration. The ethics matters he handled, including advising senior
department officials about whether to recuse themselves from particular issues,
were transferred to two political appointees.
In July, Bondi fired the
department’s senior career ethics lawyer, Joseph Tirrell, in a letter that
misspelled his name as “Jospeh.” In his first interview since being terminated,
Tirrell told me that he presumed he was fired because of his decision, in the
closing weeks of the Biden Administration, to sign off on Jack Smith’s request
to accept pro-bono legal services from the Washington law firm Covington &
Burling. As Tirrell describes it, the decision was a no-brainer. Federal
regulations explicitly permit government employees to take free help for legal
matters that arise in connection with their employment, and Trump’s
campaign-trail demands that Smith be prosecuted meant that the special counsel
was wise to prepare for that eventuality. Tirrell has filed a lawsuit
challenging his dismissal. “They’re firing people solely for doing the work
that they were required to do,” he said. “There’s definitely this culture of
fear that’s been created in the department.”
One of the driving
convictions of the Bondi Justice Department is that its predecessor, acting at
the direction of the White House, improperly pursued Trump. Numerous
prosecutors who worked on the criminal cases against Trump have been fired.
“Obviously, you cannot have the people who were prosecuting the President of
the United States still working for the President of the United States,”
Mizelle said. “I mean, we would be stupid, right?” (For department veterans,
that is not at all obvious. The career prosecutors assigned to work on the
Trump cases were following legitimate instructions from the political officials
in charge, much as Bondi has demanded of the career staff that reports to her.)
Bondi has created a “weaponization” working group to
examine what Trump has called the “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of
prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Whether it will produce
the actual indictments—not to mention convictions—that Trump craves is far from
clear, but its activities have ramped up. Early this month, Bondi reportedly
authorized Ed Martin—a former Stop the Steal activist who heads the new working
group—to open criminal investigations into Senator Adam Schiff and New York’s
attorney general, Letitia James. Schiff, as the chair of the House Intelligence
Committee, had helped lead the 2020 impeachment proceedings, and James had
successfully brought a civil fraud case against Trump. The New York Times also
reported that the acting U.S. Attorney in Albany was investigating whether
James’s office had violated Trump’s civil rights in pursuing its fraud suit.
Jared Wise, a former
F.B.I. agent who was criminally charged with encouraging the January 6th
insurrection, recently joined the department to work on weaponization.
According to his indictment, Wise told D.C. police officers at the Capitol that
day, “I’m former law enforcement. You’re disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are
the Gestapo.” As officers were knocked to the ground in front of him, Wise,
according to body-camera footage, yelled, “Yeah, fuck them! Yeah, kill ’em!”
The jury in Wise’s case was about to begin deliberating when Trump took office
and ordered such prosecutions dismissed. In a statement, a department
spokesperson called Wise “a valued member of the organization,” adding, “We
appreciate his contributions.”
Under Bondi, perceived
weaponization has produced the real thing. But Justice Department officials
bristle at the suggestion that her actions are anything beyond a necessary
response to Biden Administration overreach. “I don’t think you will be taken
seriously,” Mizelle warned me, “if you don’t acknowledge that prosecuting the
former President of the United States was the single greatest shift toward
weaponization that the Department of Justice ever could have undergone. And so
any sort of notion that anything she does is even comparable to that just can’t
be taken seriously. It’s laughable.”
This raises the
unsettling question of what happens when a Democrat is elected President. Does
one purge beget another? Once the criminal-justice system is deployed against
political enemies, can that cycle be broken? I was haunted by my conversation
with Sauer, the Solicitor General, who praised Bondi’s “absolute sense” of the
“strategic judgment calls” that must be made in litigation. “When is it time to
show judgment and restraint?” Sauer asked. “When is it time to be creative and
aggressive . . . in taking a legal position that will advance
the President’s agenda?” I suggested that it was hard to discern much restraint
in the legal positions the department has advocated under Bondi. The Solicitor
General laughed. “We view it,” he said, “the opposite way.” ♦
