When Pam Bondi agreed to be attorney general under President Donald Trump, she knew what was being asked of her. Trump made no secret of his desire to transform the Justice Department from an impartial, independent law enforcement agency into a weapon for revenge against his political adversaries. She was to treat Trump’s enemies as targets of the U.S. government.
Bondi showed no hesitation in that regard and hit the ground running once confirmed — but it was not enough for Trump. On Thursday, she became the second member of Trump’s Cabinet to be fired this year. MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian reported Bondi was fired mostly because Trump “grew dissatisfied with her inability to deliver on prosecuting his perceived enemies.”
Notwithstanding Bondi’s multiple glaring errors and own goals, most of the forces working against her were outside of her direct control.
Notwithstanding Bondi’s multiple glaring errors and own goals, most of the forces working against her were outside of her direct control. Even as she failed in Trump’s main objective for her, in her desperate attempts to make good on the president’s wishes, she still managed to do serious harm to the DOJ. The choices Bondi made in the name of appeasing Trump damaged its reputation, hollowed out its staff, and left her successor even less poised to uphold the nations’ laws fairly and evenly.
For all Trump’s ire about Bondi’s failures to prosecute his perceived enemies, it’s hard to see what more she could have done to slake his thirst for revenge. After all, her hands were tied by a simple fact: There is no law against making the president mad. Bondi still devoted a significant portion of the department’s resources toward finding something, anything, to use against Trump’s political foes in court, especially after Trump publicly admonished her to move faster.
The resulting prosecutions were almost all too weak to hold up in the face of the court’s scrutiny. Some could not even clear the low bar of a grand jury indictment. An ambitious but severely inexperienced prosecutor installed by Bondi got a grand jury to indict former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, but those indictments were overturned. Subsequent efforts to pin them with alleged crimes have gone nowhere. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is reportedly under investigation, but there have been few updates in that matter since November.
The attempts from U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro to go after former President Joe Biden and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell have fared little better. Probes into Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for allegedly impeding law enforcement have drawn no charges. In fact, the most successful of the indictments against Trump’s antagonists, a classified documents retention case against his former national security advisor, John Bolton, came from an investigation the Biden administration launched.
There was little else in Bondi’s record at Main Justice to buoy her in the face of this failure in Trump’s eyes. The administration’s disastrous handling of the files surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted child sex abuser, fell squarely on her shoulders. While the scandal surrounding the so-called Epstein files had no good outcome, given how much of it was based on conspiracy theories, Bondi’s fumbling only added fuel to the fire.
Weeks into her tenure, Bondi insisted in a memo to federal lawyers that they “are expected to zealously advance, protect, and defend their client’s interests.” She meant that to be as Trump’s interests, of course, not the federal government’s orAmericans’. But her ironfisted attempts to instill loyalty and devotion for Trump in DOJ lawyers failed spectacularly. We have seen a massive rush to the exits from career DOJ attorneys, and those who have stayed have scrambled to handle an onslaught of cases brought against the administration.
Bondi’s failure, then, was not a lack of enthusiasm but her inability to bend the justice system past its breaking point.
The dearth of Civil Division lawyers willing to defend Trump’s policies is a function of how indefensible those policies are. Federal courts have been flooded with immigration cases, many of which have seen lawyers stammering to explain to judges how the plaintiff’s rights haven’t been violated. The Civil Rights Division, once a jewel of the federal government and a defender of access to the ballot box, has now adopted a mission that includes blocking Americans from the polls.
All of this was done to please Trump and align the DOJ with his authoritarian vision. Bondi’s failure, then, was not a lack of enthusiasm but her inability to bend the justice system past its breaking point. Despite a boost from a pliant majority on the Supreme Court, there were simply too many roadblocks keeping her from persecuting the people on Trump’s list of targets.
With Bondi gone, acting Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will step up until a replacement is confirmed. Early reporting points to Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin as a likely candidate. Zeldin may perform better under the spotlight of a congressional grilling than Bondi and may prove himself to be more creative in stretching the law to attack the people Trump wants to attack. But absent a total rewrite of America’s criminal code to better suit Trump’s wishes, he will have the same problems pleasing Trump that Bondi had.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.