Pam Bondi's Legacy of Destruction
She leaves DOJ's reputation and integrity in tatters
Pamela Jo Bondi is out as Donald Trump’s Attorney General. That’s good news for anyone who cares about the Department of Justice and the rule of law. In just over a year in office, Bondi caused incalculable damage to the justice system and to the U.S. Justice Department. I fear that damage will take a generation or more to repair, if it can be repaired at all.
While Bondi’s ouster is good news, there is no reason to expect that things will dramatically improve at the Justice Department. Any replacement Trump selects undoubtedly will be equally willing to debase the Department by operating it as a political wing of Trump’s White House. Although Bondi’s departure is cause for celebration, the battle to protect the justice system from the Trump administration is far from over.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi (Chip Somodevilla/Getty images)
Bondi’s Tragic Track Record
In Bondi, Trump thought he had found the Attorney General he always wanted. During his first term, his Attorneys General and other senior Justice Department officials still had some respect for the institution, its mission, and its political independence. They often pushed back against Trump’s worst impulses and failed to follow his most extreme commands.
Trump didn’t make that mistake in his second term. From Bondi on down, he filled the Justice Department with loyalists willing to carry out his corrupt agenda. As Attorney General, Bondi abandoned the tradition of DOJ independence from the White House. She did her best to use the power of the justice system to further Trump’s political goals, punish his enemies, and reward his friends. Even Bill Barr, Trump’s first-term Attorney General whose misdeeds included misleading the public about the Mueller report and personally intervening to seek a more lenient sentence for Trump crony Roger Stone, was a virtual paragon of justice by comparison.
Some have argued that under Bondi the Justice Department became Trump’s personal law firm, but that’s too generous. A law firm typically would strive to obey court orders, follow the law, behave ethically, and be candid with judges. Bondi’s DOJ did none of that.
But Bondi’s best efforts to please her boss, including her nauseating, sycophantic performances lavishly praising Trump during Cabinet meetings, were not enough. Reportedly dissatisfied with her handling of the Epstein files and her failure to be more aggressive in prosecuting his enemies, Trump fired her last week.
The record of damage and scandal that Bondi leaves behind is truly staggering. Here are just some highlights:
In one of the most serious abuses of her power, Bondi sought to follow Trump’s commands to use the criminal justice system as a weapon against his political enemies. Her DOJ brought deeply flawed criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, which were promptly thrown out of court. It opened a criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, which a federal judge found was done for the improper purpose of influencing the Fed to reduce interest rates. It tried to indict six Members of Congress for making a video correctly reminding members of the military that they should not follow unlawful orders (a message that may be increasingly relevant in the coming days); a grand jury rejected the case. Investigations against others, such as California Senator Adam Schiff, reportedly are still pending.
Although Bondi did her best to prosecute Trump’s political foes, she failed miserably as the safeguards built into our justice system thwarted her efforts. Her willingness to pursue such cases was a gross abuse of her position and showed her disdain for the rule of law in this country. Authoritarian leaders use the criminal justice system to punish their opponents. We don’t do that here – but Bondi was happy to try.
Bondi botched the handling of the Epstein files at every step of the process. After claiming that a list of Epstein’s clients was on her desk ready to be revealed, she later backtracked and said there was nothing to disclose. When Congress passed a law mandating that the files be released, her DOJ violated the law, missed deadlines, and dragged its heels. It released documents that identified Epstein’s victims while redacting names of the powerful men, including Trump, who associated with Epstein. Thousands of files, some of which may implicate Trump, still have not been released. Bondi’s lawlessness and incompetence guaranteed that this story stayed in the headlines for months and is not going away any time soon.
Bondi caused a massive loss of legal talent and experience at the Justice Department. She appeased Trump’s desire for vengeance by wrongfully purging DOJ and the FBI of anyone who worked on his prosecutions. She gutted entire units such as the Civil Rights Division and Public Integrity Section, leaving them understaffed and signaling that protecting civil rights and pursuing public corruption are not a priority of this administration. Thousands of experienced prosecutors and agents have resigned rather than work for her. This brain drain is a huge loss for the country that will persist long after Trump is gone; expertise and institutional knowledge built up over decades cannot easily be replaced.
Prosecutors in Bondi’s DOJ have repeatedly been called out by federal judges for misleading or lying to the courts and violating court orders, and have even been threatened with contempt. This has caused many judges to abandon the “presumption of regularity” that the government traditionally enjoyed – the judicial doctrine that led courts to assume, absent clear evidence to the contrary, that executive officials have properly discharged their duties and are being candid with the courts. That presumption, carefully curated over decades by officials acting in good faith who understood their obligations, has been shredded in just a year. The courts no longer trust the Justice Department. How long will it take to reclaim that trust in the post-Trump era?
Bondi’s Justice Department has failed adequately to investigate the shootings by Homeland Security agents of Minneapolis protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Abandoning standard procedure, DOJ declined to have expert prosecutors in the Civil Rights Division investigate the shootings. Rather than cooperating with state officials, the federal government has stonewalled Minnesota to prevent it from conducting its own criminal investigations. Recently the state was forced to take the unusual step of suing the federal government to obtain access to the evidence in the shootings.
DOJ’s slavish support of Trump’s immigration policies has led it to dramatically overcharge anyone who dared to object, such as the “Subway Sandwich” guy charged with an eight-year felony for throwing a footlong at a federal agent. These prosecutions have largely failed as grand juries and trial juries have rejected the charges, resulting in an embarrassing string of defeats for the government.
Bondi’s DOJ shut down more than 23,000 criminal investigations into cases involving terrorism, white collar crime, drugs, and other offenses, in order to shift resources to pursue immigration cases. For an administration that claims to be “tough on crime,” this is a remarkable track record of walking away from serious criminal investigations. For white collar criminals, a primary focus of this blog, life under Bondi’s DOJ has been good.
Bondi’s DOJ has participated in Trump’s corrupt abuse of the pardon power, which he routinely uses to reward political allies and fellow white collar criminals. The traditional process for reviewing requests for clemency has been abandoned. An entire industry has sprung up where wealthy criminals hire lobbyists and make hefty political donations to Trump or his allies in pursuit of a pardon.
Bondi’s DOJ has also rewarded Trump’s friends and allies by failing to pursue legitimate investigations. For example, before Trump was inaugurated, “border czar” Tom Homan was under federal investigation for allegedly accepting $50,000 in cash in a fast-food bag in exchange for a promise to help the donor obtain federal contracts once he was in the administration. Once Trump and Bondi took office, that investigation was quietly dropped. We still don’t know what happened to the money.
Bondi gave clownish, combative, and offensive performances while testifying on Capitol Hill. She came to hearings armed with lists of insults she then hurled at Members of Congress as if she were on a playground. She failed to answer questions and generally treated a co-equal branch of government with disrespect and disdain. In perhaps the most egregious example, at a recent hearing she refused to acknowledge the Epstein survivors standing right behind her while shouting that what the public should really be focusing on is that the Dow was above 50,000. Her embarrassing performances, unworthy of the nation’s top legal officer, were clearly intended to impress an audience of one. Apparently they weren’t enough.
I could go on. The bottom line is that Bondi was a terrible Attorney General who did enormous damage to the country and to the Justice Department. She leaves with the reputation and integrity of the Department in tatters. It’s been terrible to watch. It’s true she was simply trying to follow the corrupt commands of the president who appointed her. But the country has a right to expect more of the person who occupies the high office that she held and abused.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Pam.
What’s Next for the Justice Department
Although Bondi’s departure is good news, there is probably little reason to expect that things will improve at the Justice Department under her replacement. Indeed, things could get even worse if someone more competent than Bondi but with the same corrupt goals takes her place.
For now, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has been named the acting Attorney General. Blanche is one of Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorneys and previously was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York.
Some had hoped that Blanche might be a moderating influence in Trump’s DOJ and would retain some respect for the institution. But he has compiled a track record of his own and shown himself to be simply another Trump loyalist. For example:
Blanche recently bragged about “cleaning house” at DOJ and the FBI by firing hundreds of prosecutors and agents who had been involved in the Trump prosecutions. In other words, he’s proud that DOJ and the FBI furthered Trump’s desire for retribution by forcing out career professionals for simply doing their jobs.
Last November Blanche was widely criticized for asserting that the Trump administration is at “war” with “rogue, activist judges” — generally defined as any judge who has the temerity to disagree with the Trump administration.
Blanche conducted a controversial interview with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, during which she said (what a surprise) she never saw Trump do anything wrong. Blanche spoke to Maxwell alone, which is highly unusual. A few days after that friendly interview Maxwell, who is serving a twenty-year sentence for child sex trafficking, was transferred to a minimum security prison, despite the fact that sex offenders typically do not qualify for such facilities. Perhaps even Trump realizes that pardoning Maxwell would be a disaster, but it certainly appears she is being rewarded for saying the right thing - or for keeping her mouth shut.
In addition, of course, Blanche was Bondi’s second-in-command and is tainted by many of the same scandals that marked her tenure. So no, I don’t expect things to get a lot better under his leadership.
Given the difficulty Trump has getting his nominees named and approved, Blanche could be in charge for some time. There are reports that Trump intends to nominate Lee Zeldin, the current director of the EPA, to permanently fill the position, but that is not yet confirmed.
Zeldin is a Trump loyalist but less of a known quantity. He has no prosecution experience. But as I mentioned above, unfortunately there’s little reason to hope that anyone Trump appoints will be a substantial improvement over Bondi. The fish rots from the head down.
For today, we can celebrate that a truly bad person no longer holds one of the most powerful positions in the federal government.
Tomorrow, the resistance goes on.