Pam
Bondi’s Legacy of Flattery and Destruction
No Attorney General has
done more damage to the Justice Department. Her successor could be even more
dangerous.
By Ruth Marcus
April 3, 2026
Congress created the office of Attorney General in the
Judiciary Act of 1789, providing for the appointment of a person “learned in
the law” to advise the President on legal matters. Eighty-four men and three
women have held the job since then; the most recent occupant, Pam Bondi, who was fired on Thursday, would face
some competition for the title of worst Attorney General. After all, some of
her predecessors were outright corrupt: Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John
Mitchell, served time in prison for helping orchestrate the Watergate break-in
and coverup. Some were heedless of the Constitution they had sworn to uphold:
Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer, directed the raids that bear his name, leading to the mass
arrest and deportation of suspected anarchists. But no Attorney General in
history has caused more damage to the department itself—damage that promises to
long outlast Bondi’s tenure, and to be deepened, not repaired, by whoever is chosen
to succeed her.
Bondi, a former attorney general of
Florida, has presided over a department that has eagerly subordinated itself to
President Donald Trump’s whims. That submission, made manifest by the banner of
a glowering Trump that now hangs from the Department of Justice building,
included seeking to bring baseless cases against Trump’s perceived political
enemies, ordered up by the President himself; purging the department of career
lawyers and F.B.I. agents deemed insufficiently loyal; and launching a
belligerent campaign against “rogue judges” who dared to challenge
Administration actions. Beyond the mass firings, the ranks of the department
have been depleted by the departure of employees who could not stomach the new
order; the resulting loss of expertise will take generations to rebuild. So
will the department’s credibility: under Bondi, it has squandered the
traditional deference afforded to lawyers who appear in court on behalf of the
United States, known as “the presumption of regularity.” “You have taken the presumption
of regularity and you’ve destroyed it, in my view,” the federal judge
overseeing the government’s efforts to deport Kilmar Ábrego García told department
lawyers last year, and she is far from alone in her exasperation.
Bondi fawned over Trump in a way
unbefitting the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. At an early Cabinet
meeting, Bondi said, “President, your first one hundred days has far exceeded
that of any other Presidency in this country, ever, ever.” She treated
Democratic members of Congress with undisguised contempt, including at an appearance
before the House Judiciary Committee, in February. “You don’t tell me anything,
you washed-up loser lawyer. Not even a lawyer,” Bondi yelled at the panel’s
ranking Democrat, Jamie Raskin, of Maryland (who, as it happens, is a Harvard
Law graduate and a former constitutional-law professor). Questioned about her
handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, Bondi deflected. “The Dow is over fifty
thousand right now, the S. & P. at almost seven thousand, and the Nasdaq
smashing records, Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming,” she
said, launching a thousand memes.
But Bondi’s departure does not augur a better world to
come. Like the former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem,
whom Trump fired in March, Bondi had become a political
liability. She had, in the words of the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles,
“completely whiffed” on dealing with conservative clamor for the Epstein files.
As Wiles told Vanity Fair, “First she gave them binders
full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client
list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on
her desk.” No single issue has plagued Trump’s second term more than his
dealings with the convicted sex offender, and Bondi botched the matter from the
start—a reality underscored by the Republican-controlled House Oversight
Committee’s vote, last month, to subpoena Bondi’s testimony regarding the
Epstein files.
Trump’s move to get rid of Noem,
however, also reflected some degree of recognition that the mass-deportation
campaign had gone too far, or at least turned off too many Trump supporters. In
Bondi’s case, the President was reportedly furious not because she went too far
but because she had failed to do his bidding swiftly and effectively enough.
His dwindling patience emerged in a Truth Social post from September,
2025—Trump reportedly had meant it as a private message to Bondi—in which the
President addressed her as “Pam” and railed about the department’s failure to
secure indictments against the former F.B.I. director James Comey, the New York attorney general Letitia James, and the California senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s
killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump instructed Bondi. “They
impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE
SERVED, NOW!!!” The department duly secured indictments of Comey and James,
only to have them dismissed after a federal judge found that Lindsey Halligan,
the insurance lawyer tapped by Trump to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the
Eastern District of Virginia, had been improperly appointed. Since then, the
department has been stalled in its efforts to secure the kind of prosecutions
that he has demanded. Prosecutors were stymied in their efforts to find a
criminal case in President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to grant pardons. A
federal grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress who had
posted a video reminding service members they are not obliged to follow illegal
orders. In Virginia, grand juries twice balked at indictments of James after
the original charges were tossed.
The new Attorney General is apt to be
just as destructive as Bondi—maybe even more so, given that Bondi, who had
little familiarity with the federal legal system, was not terribly effective in
the job. Trump named the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, formerly one of
the President’s criminal-defense lawyers, as acting Attorney General. Blanche
is a veteran of the prestigious Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, and there was
some hope, when he was named to the department’s No. 2 role, that he would help
stand up for its independence. But there is little evidence that Blanche has
tempered Trump’s worst instincts, and ample illustration that he is fully on
board with the President’s agenda. He conducted a credulous interview with
Ghislaine Maxwell, last July, which looks even shoddier now than it did then,
in light of the Epstein documents that have since been released. Last week,
Blanche spoke at CPAC, the
Conservative Political Action Conference, a venue far more partisan than is
common for a Deputy Attorney General. Blanche did not shy away from politics—he
plunged in. Disputing reports that he had been a Democrat, Blanche paused.
“Everybody’s supposed to say ‘Boo,’ ” he told the audience, before
thanking them when they responded accordingly. This is not acceptable behavior
from a senior law-enforcement official.
Maybe Blanche will get the job
permanently. Maybe Trump will turn to Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator,
who has no prosecutorial experience but has demonstrated the primary
requirement: unswerving fealty to Trump. Years ago, during his first term,
Trump was lamenting the perfidy of his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions,
the former Alabama senator. Sessions was insisting on recusing himself from the
probe into the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia; Trump wanted him to
stay, the better to protect his interests. “Where’s my Roy Cohn,” Trump
demanded, referring to the legendary former fixer who had shown Trump how to
bend the legal system to his will. With Bondi gone—she’ll be “transitioning to
a much needed and important new job in the private sector,” Trump announced in
a post—his quest for the next Roy Cohn continues. Anyone he picks for the post
will understand clearly what that entails. ♦
