Pam Bondi Puts Loyalty to Trump First
The disturbing
priorities revealed in the attorney general nominee’s answers—and non-answers.
Jan 16, 2025
IF THESE WERE “NORMAL” TIMES, Pam
Bondi almost certainly would not be confirmed as attorney general. But these
are far from normal times, and with her leading the Department of Justice under
a re-elected Donald Trump, the times are likely to get a whole lot less normal.
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary
Committee began confirmation hearings for the former Florida attorney general
Trump picked after the catastrophic collapse of his first choice for U.S.
attorney general, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, because of an investigation by
the House Ethics
Committee into allegations that Gaetz paid for sex, including
with a minor, and used illegal drugs while a member of Congress. Although it’s
almost certain that Bondi will be confirmed, there are at least three
disqualifying issues with her candidacy.
1. Potentially Grave Conflicts of Interest
Bondi is a career prosecutor who
served as Florida’s 37th and first female attorney general from 2011 to 2019,
after which she became a lobbyist for Ballard Partners in the firm’s
Washington, D.C. office. Her thirty corporate and
foreign clients included General
Motors, Uber, Major League Baseball, and Carnival North America. The Department
of Justice is currently investigating two of her other clients, Amazon and the GEO
Group, the latter of which is a private prison company that stands
to benefit heavily from mass deportations. Bondi’s firm also represents many
other clients with business before DOJ, such as Boeing, Blackstone, and Google.
Bondi also lobbied for a Kuwaiti firm and was registered as a foreign agent for
the government of Qatar.
In her Senate nominee questionnaire,
Bondi failed to disclose any of these potential conflicts of interest. Bondi
nonetheless emphasized during her testimony that she will not play politics as
attorney general. When pressed about acting as a registered foreign agent, she
insisted that the $115,000 monthly retainer was spread across several people at
the firm and that she is proud of the work she did for Qatar.
Bondi has yet to account for what is
perhaps the biggest stain on her credibility as a rule-of-law prosecutor. In
2013, Trump’s charitable foundation donated $25,000 to
And Justice for All, a PAC linked with Bondi. This donation came three days
after a spokeswoman for the Florida attorney general’s office said that Bondi
was reviewing allegations against get-rich-quick seminars associated with Trump
contained in a lawsuit by the state of New York. The lawsuit alleged that Trump
University and its affiliates were “sham for-profit” colleges and ripped off
5,000 consumers. Bondi subsequently declined to join the lawsuit against Trump
University and backed Trump in defending the donation.
In 2016, Citizens for Responsibility
and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint about the donation with the IRS. In
response, the Trump Foundation claimed—implausibly—that it had made an error
and that it had actually intended the donation to go not to
Bondi’s And Justice for All PAC but rather to a similarly named Kansas-based
anti-abortion nonprofit, Justice for All. In June 2016,
as Bondi faced increased criticism over the issue, her spokesperson stated that
Bondi had in fact solicited the donation from Trump several
weeks before her office had announced their contemplation of joining the Trump
University fraud lawsuit. In September 2016,
the IRS determined that the donation violated laws against nonprofit
organizations making political contributions and ordered Trump to pay a fine
for the contribution and to reimburse the foundation for the sum that had been
donated to Bondi. Neither Bondi nor her PAC were fined or criminally charged.
As Bondi well knows, Rule 1.7 of
the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct makes clear
that “loyalty and independent judgment are essential elements in the lawyer’s
relationship to a client” and that “concurrent conflicts of interest can arise
from the lawyer’s responsibilities to another client, a former client or a
third person or from the lawyer’s own interests.” Prosecutors pick and choose
which cases to pursue and which to drop. The law and facts are rarely cut and
dry. So far, Bondi has not adequately addressed concerns that she might put her
foot on the gas or pump the brakes based on loyalty to corporate or foreign
interests—or to the president-elect himself.
2. Adherence to the Big Lie
Bondi was repeatedly asked during the
hearing whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected; she refused to answer,
merely conceding that he is currently the president of the United States. When
pushed, she hinted that the Pennsylvania election in 2020 had problems with
fraud, a claim for which there is zero evidence. That she cannot admit that the
law has spoken on that subject in her audition for the job of the nation’s top
prosecutor is disturbing, to say the least.
All through the hearing, Bondi and
Senate Republicans hammered the idea that DOJ has been politicized and that
she’ll be the catalyst for much-needed reform. The undercurrent, of course, was
that Trump was supposedly wrongly investigated and prosecuted by Special
Counsel Jack Smith. By this metric, no politician could ever be legitimately
held to account for violating criminal laws because to even suggest a
politician committed a crime collides head on with politics. The argument also
ignores the possibility that the facts and the law pointed to criminal
activity, which the attorney general has a solemn duty to pursue.
3. Refusal to Disobey Illegal or Unconstitutional
Directives
Worse, Bondi refused to answer whether
she would refuse to follow illegal or unconstitutional orders, defensively
declaring that she has no reason to believe Trump would ask such a thing. Nor
would Bondi state that she’ll decline prosecutions of former Special Counsel
Jack Smith or former Rep. Liz Cheney, who has been a vocal critic of Trump and
was an outspoken member of the House January 6th Committee. When Sen. Mazie
Hirono (D-Hawaii) pursued this line of questioning, Bondi talked over her,
declaring with no sense of irony that the query itself only adds to the
politicization of the criminal justice system.
When asked about Trump’s
characterization of the January 6th insurrectionists as “hostages” and
“patriots,” Bondi claimed she was not “familiar” with those statements. This is
simply not credible. She also feigned ignorance regarding Trump’s assertion that
immigrants are “poisoning the blood
of our country.”
In Bondi’s defense, nobody who dared
answer these questions differently could possibly get the job. And she did make
a few promising admissions—including that presidents can only serve two terms
under the Twenty-second Amendment, and that there will be no “enemies list” at
the DOJ (while vigorously endorsing Kash Patel for FBI director, despite his
own well-known enemies list).
Bondi, like her incoming boss, knows
full well that despite what she says under oath to Congress, she will enter the
Trump administration effectively above the law. We can only hope that she
adheres to the values of decency that go along with what she called her
favorite part of the oath of office: “under God.”
Attorney general
nominee Pam Bondi: Qualified but questionable
Ruth Marcus
Better than Matt Gaetz
is not saying much.
January
16, 2025 at 3:27 p.m. ESTYesterday at 3:27 p.m. EST
The best thing about Pam Bondi is that she’s not Matt
Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump’s initial pick for attorney general, who
blew up with supersonic speed. The second-best thing is that she’s not Kash
Patel, Trump’s outlandishly irresponsible choice to head the FBI, who, based on
Senate Republicans’ supine performance, looks likely to squeak through.
Bondi’s not-Gaetzness offers some comfort — but not much,
judging by her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Unlike the disgraced former congressman, Bondi, a former Florida attorney
general, has the experience and demeanor to be the nation’s chief law
enforcement officer.
Testifying at her confirmation hearing, Bondi said many of
the things that a normal candidate for attorney general would say: that she
won’t use the Justice Department to launch prosecutions of political opponents;
that she will follow the facts and the law in bringing cases; that she will
exercise independent judgment if confirmed as the nation’s 87th attorney
general, which appears inevitable.
But, of course, Bondi is not a normal candidate for
attorney general, because she is the choice of a president with a decidedly
abnormal view of the Justice Department — specifically, that it should bend to
his will and punish those who dare to oppose him. She is the choice of a
president who values loyalty over all and who found himself so frustrated by
the two men who served in the role during his first term that he fired one and
denounced the other — a president who has proclaimed his “absolute right to do
what I want with the Justice Department.”
Trump knows what he wants in an attorney general — someone
who will do his bidding — and he chose Bondi, who represented Trump during his
first impeachment hearing and in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The
question Bondi could not convincingly answer was whether she would have the
fortitude, the strength of character, to stand up to him.
The panel’s ranking Democrat, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin,
framed the stakes. “At issue, I believe in this nomination hearing is not your
competence nor your experience,” he told Bondi. “At issue is your ability to
say no. More than any other Cabinet official, the attorney general has to be
prepared to put the Constitution first and even tell the president of the
United States, ‘You’re wrong.’”
Say no? Bondi couldn’t even tell Trump that he lost the
2020 election. Like so many other Trump acolytes, she has said no more than
that Joe Biden was “duly sworn in” as president. Truth-avoidance has apparently
become the price of admission to the Trump administration. But given that
Trump’s attorney general during that election, William P. Barr, found no “fraud
on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” this
coddling of Trump’s illusions is particularly concerning from a nominee for the
same position.
Where Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to head the Defense
Department, parried question after question from his confirmation panel on the
grounds that they were “anonymous smears,” Bondi’s go-to move was to profess
ignorance.
What about Patel’s comments that he would shut down FBI
headquarters on Day 1 and prosecute those who “helped Joe Biden rig
presidential elections?” asked Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal.
“Senator, I am not familiar with all those comments,” Bondi replied.
Did she agree with Trump’s characterization of the Jan. 6, 2021, defendants as “hostages” and
“patriots,” asked Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono.
Bondi: “I am not familiar with that statement, senator.
Hirono: “I just familiarized you with that statement. Do
you agree with it?”
Bondi: “I’m not familiar with it, senator.”
When claims of ignorance didn’t suffice, Bondi dodged by
claiming she was being asked hypotheticals. About a Trump directive to violate
ethical or legal rules. About whether she would prosecute former special
counsel Jack Smith or former congresswoman Liz Cheney.
“Senator, I will never speak on a hypothetical, especially
one saying that the president would do something illegal,” she told Delaware
Democrat Chris Coons.
But these are anything but hypothetical situations.
We know Trump pressured FBI director James B. Comey to drop
a probe into his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and fired Comey
after he refused. We know Trump berated attorney general Jeff Sessions for
recusing himself from a special counsel investigation and then fired him, as
well. It says something about Trump’s hold on his people that Bondi could not
bring herself to say straight out that she would stand up to such misconduct.
Trump has publicly called for Smith and Cheney to be
jailed; no hypothetical there. Bondi herself called Smith a “rabid dog” and told the Judiciary Committee
that “what I’m hearing on the news is horrible.” California Democrat Adam
Schiff had every reason to ask whether she believes there is a factual
predicate to launch a criminal probe.
She also evaded legitimate inquiry by simply rewriting
history. Asked about Trump’s 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger pressing him to “find 11,780 votes,” Bondi disputed the
premise. “Senator, I have not listened to the hour-long conversation, but it’s
my understanding that is not what he asked him to do.” Seriously?
Read the transcript.
Bondi even rewrote her own chilling words: “At the Department of Justice,
the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” she told Fox News in 2023.
“The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state, last term for
President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight
on them and they can all be investigated.” Bondi’s translation on Wednesday: “I
said, prosecutors will be prosecuted, to finish the quote, if bad.”
That’s slicing off a lot of red meat.
Bondi could be worse. Trump made sure to show us that. But
we should not be satisfied with her. The Department of Justice and the country
deserve better.
