In a remarkably short tenure as attorney general, Pam Bondi helped drag one of the country’s most respected institutions deeper into grievance, spectacle and political retaliation.
Even that was not enough for Donald Trump.
Bondi’s ouster on Thursday says something important about what happened to the Justice Department on her watch. Pressure behind her removal was driven not only by her handling of the Epstein files, but also reportedly by the view that she had not moved aggressively enough against Trump’s political adversaries. Her immediate replacement is Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer who had been deputy attorney general.
For generations, the Department of Justice stood for something larger than politics. Bondi helped replace that culture with something smaller and more cynical.
Bondi’s tenure was brief but revealing. For generations, the Department of Justice stood for something larger than politics: rigor, discipline, restraint and the idea that immense state power should be exercised by people trying — however imperfectly — to get things right. Bondi helped replace that culture with something smaller and more cynical: a department in which grievance became mission, public performance displaced internal rigor and loyalty to the president eclipsed loyalty to the institution.
The corrosion began at the level of tone and expectation. Bondi did not arrive sounding like someone who believed she was inheriting an institution whose independence needed protecting. She talked about rooting out internal opponents, embraced Trump’s rhetoric of “weaponization” and responded to allegations of politicized law enforcement with more politicized law enforcement. What was packaged as a campaign to restore integrity looked, from the start, like an effort to revisit Trump’s resentments about prosecutors, investigators and public officials he regarded as enemies.
Then came the institutional consequences. Career officials were fired, reassigned or otherwise pushed out. Internal safeguards were weakened. The Public Integrity Section, the post-Watergate unit designed to prevent politicized corruption prosecutions, was stripped of authority and downsized sharply.
In the Civil Rights Division, the exodus was staggering. Lawyers left in extraordinary numbers amid complaints that staff were being pushed to fit facts to predetermined political outcomes. One of the Justice Department’s most respected units was treated as expendable because its traditional mission did not align neatly enough with the Trump administration’s political project.
The Eric Adams episode captured the rot in one grotesque burst. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan were directed to drop the corruption case against New York’s then-mayor. What followed was not quiet compliance, but principled resignations. U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon’s resignation letter made clear this was not a routine disagreement over charging strategy. She described a meeting in which lawyers for Adams advanced what looked very much like a quid pro quo: leniency for federal crimes in exchange for political cooperation with administration priorities. Other prosecutors resigned rather than participate.
The scandal was not just that a case might be dropped. It was that the federal criminal process appeared to be getting bargained around politics. Once it looks as though the Justice Department is on board with trading law enforcement for political usefulness, the concept of neutral justice stops sounding noble and starts sounding delusional.
Meanwhile, the department normalized a menacingly selective posture toward Trump’s enemies. Under Bondi, the Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James; it has investigated former CIA Director John Brennan and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.; and pursued Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and Fed Chair Jerome Powell. The home of former Trump national security adviser John Bolton was searched. Maybe any of those events, in isolation, could be defended as legitimate. But the Justice Department has long understood that the public handling of such inquiries matters almost as much as the legal basis for them. A department serious about preserving public trust does not advertise probes of political antagonists or flirt with humiliation as a tactic. That is how prosecutorial power starts to look more like political theater with subpoena power.
And then there is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Bondi fueled a public frenzy last year by saying the Epstein “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” When the promised reckoning failed to materialize, the backlash was bipartisan and rightfully intense. This was not just a communications blunder. It was the nation’s highest law enforcement official behaving like a cable-news teaser about one of the country’s most sensitive set of records.
And that was not the worst of it. The more serious scandal was her department’s handling of the Epstein files. The release has drawn fierce criticism of inadequate or overzealous redactions and disclosures that exposed or risked exposing victims’ identities and other sensitive information. While testifying before Congress in February, Bondi refused to apologize directly to Epstein’s victims for the department’s mishandling of their information. In one of the most sensitive document productions imaginable, her DOJ managed to fail in the most shameful direction: not by finally exposing the powerful but by once again endangering the vulnerable.
A Justice Department that cannot protect sex-trafficking victims while promising transparency undermines its own credibility.
The backdrop to all this cannot be forgotten. If Bondi were being removed because she had disgraced the department, the next steps would look like repair: less spectacle, more restraint; less loyalty theater, more institutional humility. But everything about this moment suggests the opposite. Bondi helped corrode the Justice Department’s credibility, strip away its norms, hollow out internal safeguards and degrade some of its most respected divisions. Ultimately, she helped teach the public to see federal prosecution as just another front in the culture wars. And still, she was apparently not radical enough for the president she served.
The problem is not just how long the damage Bondi leaves behind will last. It’s that her removal does not mark a return to principle but suggests that even this level of degradation was merely a starting point.
Duncan Levin is a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor who serves as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and is a frequent contributor to MS NOW.