Pam Bondi’s Comeback
In 2017, Pam Bondi was passed over as too scandal-tainted.
This time, she’s the safe, acceptable fallback choice.
November 22, 2024,
11:49 AM ET
Out goes a Florida man, in comes a Florida woman. Hours
after Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, withdrew from consideration, the president-elect
last night announced that he will nominate Pam Bondi to lead the Justice
Department.
Bondi, a former attorney general of Florida, is widely
viewed as a more serious and confirmable pick, and although that is partly a
statement of what a ridiculous choice Gaetz was, it also shows how far
expectations—and standards—have been lowered since the start of the first Trump
administration. In 2017, Bondi was passed over for an administration role for
fear that she was too scandal-tainted. This time around, she’s the safe,
acceptable fallback choice.
If Bondi’s name means anything to you, you’re probably
either a Floridian or a real Trump-news obsessive. After a stint as a local
prosecutor, Bondi was elected as Florida attorney general in 2010 and served
two terms. She left that office in 2019 and worked on Trump’s defense teams for
both of his impeachment trials. Bondi also worked as a lobbyist in that
period, with clients including the Qatari government, Amazon, and Uber. (You
really don’t hear much about “draining the swamp” these days.) She also joined
the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned nonprofit.
David A. Graham: Trump’s first defeat
Bondi’s highest-profile connection to Trump began in 2013,
during her first term as Florida attorney general. Several state attorneys
general had probed Trump University, a souped-up real-estate seminar suspected
of advertising itself with fraudulent claims. In September 2013, Bondi
announced that she was considering joining a lawsuit in New York. Within days,
Trump’s personal putative charity, the Trump Foundation, had written a $25,000
check to And Justice for All, a group supporting her reelection—a donation that
Bondi had personally solicited several weeks earlier.
Bondi then declined to join the suit. (Bondi denies that the payment affected
her decision.)
In the kaleidoscopic way of Trumplandia, the foundation
itself was a kind of scam; it was later forced to shut down, and Trump admitted to 19 violations, including
self-dealing. The Trump Foundation was not legally permitted to make political
donations, and instead of reporting the pro-Bondi donation as such, it reported
it as a gift to Justice for All, a similarly named nonprofit in Kansas.
After The Washington Post uncovered the details, a Trump aide insisted
that the mistake was innocent, but the IRS fined Trump $2,500.
When Trump won the presidency in 2016, Bondi was widely
expected to land a job in his administration. In January 2017, Bloomberg even reported that an appointment was imminent,
but nothing ever materialized—apparently because Trump staffers were concerned
that questions about the donation would make confirmation hearings difficult
and damaging. How quaint—now she’s the person Trump is relying on to sail
through confirmation. And given the scale of Gaetz’s problems, the weaknesses of other Cabinet nominees, and the
fatigue among the press and populace, that seems likely to work.
She is similar in this way to John Ratcliffe, whom Trump last week nominated
to lead the CIA. During Trump’s first term, in 2019, he nominated Ratcliffe to
be director of national intelligence, a job that helps coordinate all U.S.
intelligence agencies. Ratcliffe was forced to withdraw once it was clear that
the Senate wouldn’t confirm him, because he had no real qualifications for the
job, and had exaggerated what little he did have. (I wrote at the time that Ratcliffe “would
have been the least qualified DNI in the position’s short history,” but the
current nominee for that post, Tulsi Gabbard, gives him a run for his money.) A
year later, Trump nominated him again, and this time the Senate sighed heavily
and confirmed him, despite concerns that he would improperly politicize the
job. This is precisely what he did: In the last weeks of the 2020 campaign,
Ratcliffe disclosed unverified information about the
2016 election, which career officials worried was disinformation, in a blatant
attempt to boost Trump’s reelection.
And yet when Trump announced Ratcliffe’s nomination this
time around, it was met with something between a shrug and relief. After all,
compared with Gaetz and Gabbard, here was a guy with actual experience in his
appointed subject and in the executive branch! Trump has managed to move the
goalposts so far, they’re in the budget parking lot.
Pete Hegseth, his nominee to lead the Defense Department,
fits the same pattern. He was considered to lead the Department of Veterans
Affairs in the first Trump administration, but not chosen. Now he’s been picked
to lead an even more important and sprawling bureaucracy, though the only new
qualifications he’s picked up in the ensuing years are three vitriolic books, many hours on Fox, and
dismissal from guarding Joe Biden’s inauguration. (Hegseth’s nomination seems
rickety after revelations of a sexual-assault accusation, but he may yet make
it through.)
If confirmed, Bondi will likely be a more effective and
reasonable attorney general than Gaetz. She is not driven by personal grievance
in the way he seems to be, and she has experience as both a prosecutor and a
state attorney general. Like Gaetz, however, she is unlikely to defend the
independence of the Justice Department from presidential interference. In
addition to her past loyalty, she backed Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud
in 2020. Trump has also already named three of his personal criminal-defense
attorneys to top DOJ positions. At this stage, perhaps less bad news is the
best anyone can desire, but none of this is good.
About the Author
David A. Graham is a staff writer at The
Atlantic.
