Out of touch, Out of Trust, Out of Time
Pam
Bondi’s tenure as Attorney General will live in infamy.
Apr 03, 2026
Editor’s note: This is my fourth dispatch this week, and
ordinarily, essays after the first two are reserved for paid subscribers. But
Bondi’s firing is a major development, and I think that my background gives me
a lot to say about it. So I’m making it free for everyone. If you enjoy it and
find it worthwhile, I hope you’ll think about joining the Talking Feds
community as a paid subscriber. Those subscriptions are our sole source of
funding. I also think the tight-knit community of Fed Heads gets the most from
the Substack, including weekly hour-long “Ask Me Anything” sessions, which it
so happens, will be at 4 PM ET today, so it’s an excellent time to join.
From the time she arrived in Washington, Pam Bondi appeared
out of her depth.
She lacked federal prosecutorial experience and the kind of
legal sophistication past officeholders brought to the position. Even more, she
lacked all judgment and savvy.
She resolved to turn these deficiencies into strength by
filling the gaps with a single quality: blind, all-encompassing loyalty to
Donald Trump, and a willingness to do whatever job he wanted, however dirty and
contrary to the traditional mission of the agency she was leading.
That left her with no professional grounding and no base of
support when the inevitable happened: Trump became disenchanted.
Her fall, in the manner of Washington ousters, came little
by little and then all at once.
The case against Bondi had three main counts.
The first was her failure to deliver the scalps of Trump’s
political antagonists. There were many, from James Comey to John Brennan to
Letitia James to Jerome Powell and, of course, Jack Smith.
Here, Bondi must be throwing up her hands and asking what
more she could have done. She bulldozed every norm and brought lasting shame on
herself and the Department of Justice. Probably first among her long litany of
sins as Attorney General was her willingness, in fact her eagerness, to indict
innocent persons whose only real offense was being on her patron’s shit list.
It was only by the virtue of district court judges and
citizens on grand juries that Bondi couldn’t deliver. Their refusal to comply
with the Bondi DOJ’s evil demands is one of the bright spots of the last 14
months.
But if Trump even understood the impossibility of the task he was demanding, he cut Bondi no slack. In Trump’s perverse worldview, loyalty turns on results alone. He cut the figure of a Bond villain Friday, lowering the boom with a sneering “this is the price of failure, Ms. Bond(i).”
Bondi’s second firing offense, by contrast, was largely
self-inflicted, although political developments outside of her control
magnified the harm.
No issue has pierced Trump’s Teflon coating more than the
Epstein scandal. Every time it comes back around (often after ham-handed
efforts by the administration to change the subject), Trump has been knocked
off stride and beaten up politically by the scandal in ways that countless
others have not. It continues to dog the White House to this day. And it
remains the issue most likely to produce defections among congressional
Republicans that otherwise follow him blindly.
Bondi’s worst and most enduring blunder was her assertion
in February 2021 that she had a list of Epstein’s clients on her desk. She
later was forced to eat those words to the last morsel, a humiliation in itself
that also gave rise to public suspicion that the DOJ is hiding damaging
material about Trump. Even White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the last
Bondi booster left standing, sharply criticized Bondi’s handling of the
Epstein files.
Moreover, the Department’s ongoing abominable performance
in the production of the Epstein files—a combination of fecklessness and
illegality—could not help but stick to Bondi. That’s so even as she began to
shrink from public defense of the Epstein files debacle, limiting appearances
to social media and Fox News as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, became
the front man.
With Bondi’s exit, Blanche now will take the reins as
Acting Attorney General. I don’t expect him to get the nod for the permanent
post. Blanche’s fingerprints are all over the most scandalous conduct of the
Department, dating back to the early Emil Bove days. His confirmation hearing
would be a bloodbath.
But Blanche has Trump’s confidence (for now), and recall
that he represented Trump in the New York hush money criminal case in which
Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. To many, Blanche is already no less
culpable than Bondi, because as a former AUSA, he knows all too well that the
administration has perpetrated the consummate betrayal of all DOJ stands for.
There is talk in the White House of nominating Lee Zeldin
to succeed Bondi in the confirmed post. Zeldin is currently Administrator of
the Environmental Protection Agency and has cut his teeth in Trump 2.0 by
advancing the largest environmental deregulation agenda in the agency’s
history. At a recent White House event about coal policy, Trump referred to
Zeldin as “our secret weapon.”
But the administration will be more than content to leave Blanche in the acting post, and in return, he can be counted on to continue the same lawlessness of Trump uber alles policies.
Of course, Bondi had no choice but to show up for
congressional oversight hearings. Here, she took her shameless dedication to
Trump to a new low. Her testimony dripped with contempt, as she dodged
virtually every question and instead growled out prepared attacks on the
questioner, such as, “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up, loser lawyer!”
to Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD). She stiff-armed a question from
Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) on the increased politicization of the DOJ
by deriding, “Maybe you should focus on what’s happening in your own district
before lecturing this Department.”
After her stunningly nasty bared-teeth testimony on that
February 11th hearing, Bondi reportedly was chuffed, convinced that in
alienating the members and the American people, she had done Trump proud.
No episode better illustrates Bondi’s monolithic approach to the job, and her all-in bet on Trump’s constancy, which so many suckers before her also have misjudged.
Bondi’s recent pratfall with the Jack Smith materials was
a third event that contributed to her downfall.
In an effort to discredit the prosecution led by Special
Counsel Jack Smith, the Department made selective disclosures to the House
Judiciary Committee from the Mar-a-Lago case, including internal materials that
bore directly on the evidence.
The problem was obvious. The same Department had insisted
those materials remain sealed and had invoked Judge Aileen Cannon’s order
barring disclosure of anything revealing the substance of the report. Yet
Bondi’s DOJ produced documents that did exactly that—and, in the process,
managed to highlight the strength of the case it sought to undermine. Even a
curated production could not scrub away the evidence of Trump’s guilt.
The blowback was immediate. Raskin accused Bondi of a
“frenzied search” for scraps to discredit Smith that wound up doing the
opposite. He attacked the selective production with a demand that the DOJ
furnish the Smith report that Cannon has kept under wraps for the flimsiest of
reasons. And he insisted Bondi comply with a subpoena for her testimony that a
bipartisan majority of the oversight committee already has approved.
Bondi, who already has been maneuvering to try to get out
of testifying under oath, now has a stronger argument that she needn’t testify
now that she is an ex-AG. That’s about the only shred of positive news for her
from the public humiliation. But the Dems already have indicated that they
don’t intend to let her off the hook.
In the Jack Smith episode, Bondi managed both to ignore the law that the DOJ elsewhere insisted on and still manage to cast Trump in a bad light. And for good measure, she further degraded her trust and credibility
When the end came—in tried and true Washington fashion,
first little by little, then all at once—Bondi had effectively isolated
herself.
Rumors of Trump’s displeasure had been circulating for
months, very possibly planted at the White House as a signal to Bondi to do
everything short of arresting Trump’s enemies personally. Bondi fulsomely
praised Trump at every turn, but it didn’t quiet the rumor mill.
By mid-week, there was blood in the water. Even as Trump
attended the birthright citizenship Supreme Court argument with Bondi, multiple
reporters cited multiple anonymous White House sources forecasting Bondi’s
imminent fall.That sort of coordinated leaking is a sure sign it’s time to pack
up.
Then came Trump’s tepid praise that anyone with a DC
codebook knew was a kiss of death: Trump described Bondi as a “wonderful
person” who was “doing a good job.” From a man whose limited vocabulary
consists largely of superlatives, that was the definition of damning with faint
praise.
Even Bondi recognized the ax was falling and she reportedly
went into a last gasp effort to save her job. Those final appeals typically
fail, but in Bondi’s case it’s not clear she even had any remaining champions
to try to intercede on her behalf.
As aberrant as everything in Bondi’s tenure was, her departure followed a familiar script: leaks, muted praise, a last effort to recover, and a formal announcement.
There is a temptation to see Bondi’s rise and fall in near
Shakespearean terms. In long profiles with interviews with old friends, the
common refrain is “What happened to Pam?” They obviously have been stunned by
the emergence of the vicious morally unbounded shill for Trump the country has
come to know in the last 14 months. In the tragic telling, she is transformed
and eventually laid low by her craven ambition.
For my part, I decline to see her in those terms or as any
version of a tragic hero. Her sins are panoramic and unpardonable. She
strangled the Department of Justice, inflicting damage on the institution that
may never be repaired. She gladly ruined the work and lives of thousands of DOJ
employees, whom she knew had done nothing to deserve it. She
presided over the loss of the presumption of regularity that
Department lawyers had secured over generations of integrity and dedication to
the rule of law.
All this and more she did in slavish service to the most
corrupt President in U.S history. Nothing else mattered, not fairness, not the
rule of law, not respect for judges and Congress, not the reputation of the
Department. She jettisoned it all and replaced it with a single imperative:
satisfy Donald Trump.
And when that plan stopped working, as so many could have
told her it would, she lost everything, including her reputation. She leaves
office with detractors throughout government and the likelihood that she will
be reviled in perpetuity within the Department of Justice, so long as that
agency is able to overcome her legacy and return to its defining mission of
justice without fear or favor.
Battle scarred as we are by the last 14 months, I can’t
elevate the tawdry tale of Bondi’s fitting fall into a tragedy of ambition and
hubris.
Call it as it is: not Shakespearean but Trumpian.
.jpg)
