Pam Bondi’s Power Play | The New Yorker

It is rare for an Attorney General of the United States to venture into the offices of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Up two floors and down a hallway the length of a city block from the A.G.’s fifth-floor suite, the division is a high-security area; visitors must deposit their cellphones in a cabinet before they enter and are required to punch in a code at the door. At about 1 P.M. on February 10th, just a few days after she was sworn in as the nation’s eighty-seventh Attorney General, Pam Bondi arrived at the division, accompanied by her security detail. A secretary stepped into the office of the division’s acting chief, Devin DeBacker. “Were you expecting the Attorney General?” she asked. DeBacker hurried out and saw Bondi. She was holding framed portraits of leaders of the prior Administration—President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and Bondi’s predecessor, Merrick Garland. For the past four years, the portraits had hung on the wall, and the facilities staff hadn’t yet got around to removing them. Bondi, furious, did the job herself. “Don’t you people realize who won the election?” she demanded. DeBacker had served in the White House counsel’s office during Donald Trump’s first Administration and was about to be named the senior deputy of the division. Instead, hours after Bondi’s appearance, he was informed that he was being demoted. The offending portraits were cited as the cause.

A more conventional Attorney General might have minimized the encounter for fear of seeming petty or punitive. Bondi bragged about it on Fox News, in an interview with the President’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who hosts a show on the network. “Someone didn’t tell them that there’s a new President,” Trump said to Bondi as the pair strolled down the West Wing colonnade. “I did,” Bondi replied. To Bondi and her allies, the outdated portraits offered proof that the department was riddled with suspect personnel seething at the election results. “This is the same National Security Division that was responsible for a lot of the underpinnings of the prosecution against the President,” Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, told me. “The idea that it was, ‘Oh, sorry, mere oversight’—I mean, come on, we’re not stupid.”

During the past six months, Bondi has presided over the most convulsive transition of power in the Justice Department since the Watergate era, and perhaps in the hundred-and-fifty-five-year history of the department. No Attorney General has been as aggressive in reversing policies or firing personnel. None has been as willing to cede the department’s traditional independence from the White House. In Trump’s second term—“Season 2,” Mizelle called it—“the handcuffs are taken off,” he said. “We actually get to do everything that the President wants us to do, everything that Pam wants us to do.”

Bondi’s Justice Department has vigorously defended even the most extreme elements of Trump’s agenda, including the deportation of migrants to Central American prisons and the elimination of birthright citizenship. Bondi has embraced the President’s most outlandishly unqualified nominees—such as Alina Habba, his choice to be the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, who previously served as his private lawyer and has never worked as a prosecutor—and attacked “rogue judges” who stand in her way, filing misconduct complaints against them and urging that they step aside from cases. Most alarming, Bondi’s Justice Department has demonstrated a willingness to use criminal law to exact revenge against Trump’s political enemies. Bondi has reportedly ordered up a grand-jury probe into the Obama Administration’s analysis of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, a subject already thoroughly investigated. Trump proclaimed himself “happy to hear” the news, though he was perhaps not totally satisfied. Asked about Ukraine at a news conference last week, Trump invoked Hillary Clinton’s role in the “Russia, Russia hoax,” and, pointing at Bondi, said, “I’m looking at Pam, because I hope something’s going to be done about it.”

Bondi’s performance has produced almost universal outrage from Democrats, and, in private, at least, the unhappiness crosses party lines. I spoke to officials who have served at senior levels in every Republican Justice Department since Ronald Reagan’s, including some who support much of Trump’s agenda. They shared criticism of Bondi that ranged from troubled to appalled, worrying about everything from what one former senior official called Bondi’s “ferociously sycophantic” rhetoric about the President to the purges of career staff. Bondi, many have concluded, has turned the Justice Department into a mere arm of the White House.

For Bondi, complaints from Democrats and what remains of the G.O.P. establishment are of little concern. The events of the past several weeks, however, have exposed a far greater problem for Trump’s Attorney General: the rage of the MAGA right. For years, much of the movement has been obsessed with the government’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier, child sex offender, and onetime friend of Trump’s. Once Trump returned to power, these followers were convinced, his Justice Department would reveal the truth of various conspiracy theories involving Epstein: among them that his death while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges was not suicide, and that he maintained a “client list” of celebrities and politicians. But Bondi botched the matter from the start, a misstep that threatened to turn the President’s base against him.

Bondi’s Epstein travails began on February 21st. Just a month into the new Administration, she appeared on Fox News to tease disclosures about the case: “a lot of flight logs” and “a lot of names,” she said. Asked about the famed client list, she offered, “It’s sitting on my desk right now.” The next week, Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, appeared at a White House event for conservative “influencers,” distributing white binders labelled “Epstein Files: Phase 1.” The material turned out to be mostly a rehash of previously released information. This not only infuriated Epstein conspiracy theorists but also annoyed White House officials, who hadn’t been informed of the stunt in advance. Speaking again on Fox News the next week, she assured the network’s Sean Hannity that she had received “a truckload of evidence,” and that Patel would produce “a detailed report as to why all these documents and evidence had been withheld.”

Cartoon by Roz Chast

That never happened. Instead, in early July, the Justice Department issued a memo saying that there was no client list and that it would release nothing more about Epstein. This announcement, predictably, provoked a full-blown revolt from the right. During a Cabinet meeting at the White House, Bondi attempted to revise her statement about the client list. “My response was it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed, meaning the files, along with the J.F.K., M.L.K. files, as well,” she said. The following weekend, the conservative group Turning Point USA held an annual conference in Bondi’s home town of Tampa, and speaker after speaker called for her ouster. “Her days are numbered,” the conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly predicted. “I just don’t think Pam Bondi is skilled enough to avoid making another mistake very soon.” Congressional Republicans demanded more documents, and Speaker Mike Johnson said, of Bondi’s comments about the client list, “She needs to come forward and explain that to everybody.”

As the backlash grew, Bondi seemed engaged in a frantic scramble to appease Trump and the MAGA movement, directing attention to other favored targets. The Justice Department took the unusual step of confirming that it was conducting criminal investigations into the former C.I.A. director John Brennan and the former F.B.I. director James Comey. It fired Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan who worked on the Epstein case and who—more to the point—is James Comey’s daughter. When Trump, citing the “ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” instructed the Justice Department to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony,” it scrambled to comply. (Federal judges refused to unseal the testimony, with one writing that its release would provide no new information and would only “expose as disingenuous the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal.”) In late July, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a surprising move for the department’s second-ranking official, spent two days interviewing Epstein’s partner and procurer Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a twenty-year sentence for participating in Epstein’s sexual abuse of children.

A senior Administration official told me that Bondi’s mistakes on Epstein reflected a broader failure among members of the Administration to appreciate the hold that the issue has on the MAGA world. Many did not recognize “the almost cult around the subject matter,” the official said, and so “she may have treated it a little more cavalierly than if she had it to do over now.” Some Bondi critics—perhaps engaged in wishful thinking—suggested that she had lost stature in the Administration. “I had some conversations with some White House officials,” Laura Loomer, the right-wing conspiracist and Trump ally, told me. “And they told me that the President wasn’t going to fire her but that they were going to have a conversation with her to curb back her Fox News appearances.” (Administration officials said that this conversation didn’t occur.)

Bondi appears to have retained the backing that matters most: Trump’s. In late July, when she seemed at risk of losing her job over the ongoing fiasco, I asked to speak to Susie Wiles, the President’s chief of staff. Wiles, who has known Bondi since she ran for Florida attorney general in 2010, called that very night, and praised her in terms I hadn’t expected: “You know, she looks like Barbie. She’s blond and beautiful, and I think people will underestimate her because of how she looks. But she’s got nerves of steel, and she has stood up to some withering situations with a fair amount of grace.” About Bondi’s relationship with Trump, Wiles was succinct. “I have a long one,” she said. “Hers is longer.”

Mike Davis, who heads the conservative legal group Article III Project, told me, “This Epstein mess could have been communicated better.” Still, he said, “no Republican Attorney General has been more effective so quickly as Pam Bondi. She’s not going anywhere, and she shouldn’t go anywhere.” The latest confirmation of her standing came last week, when Trump, announcing a “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime,” said that he was placing the District of Columbia’s police department under federal control and deploying National Guard troops to assist them. Bondi, he said, would be in command. On Thursday night, she named the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration the “emergency police commissioner”—only to back down the next afternoon after the D.C. attorney general sued.

If Trump is sticking with Bondi, it may be because, as one prominent conservative lawyer and Justice Department veteran told me, “in Pam Bondi, Donald Trump has the Attorney General he always wanted.” Trump’s previous selections for the post were among his greatest regrets of his first term. His initial choice for the job, the former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the probe into the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia, leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor. Trump’s second pick for Attorney General, William Barr, was loyal for a long time—until he refused to back Trump’s effort to declare the 2020 election stolen. Assembling his Cabinet for a second term, Trump would not tolerate any risk of subversion. He was looking for “the opposite of Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr,” Davis told me.

Not surprisingly, Trump balked at the establishment candidates presented to him for the post: Jay Clayton, his first-term chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Robert Giuffra, a chair of the venerable New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell; and Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey. Trump turned instead to the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a flagrantly unsuitable choice; Trump’s private lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, encouraged the selection. But Gaetz’s escapades—he was under a congressional ethics investigation for sexual misconduct and drug use—proved to be too much even for the Republican-controlled Senate. Bondi, who had been “godmother” to Gaetz’s Australian-shepherd mix, said privately that he was a poor choice for the job. (A Justice Department official denied this.)

As the Gaetz nomination foundered, Trump turned to Bondi, a former prosecutor who had served two terms as Florida’s attorney general, between 2011 and 2019. She had been the state’s first major elected official to endorse him in 2016, announcing her backing after her first choice, Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, withdrew from the primary race. At the time, the state’s Republican senator, Marco Rubio, was still in the running, deriding Trump as a “con artist.” But Adam Goodman, a political consultant who had recruited Bondi to run for attorney general, urged her to take the risk of supporting Trump. He seemed unlikely to win the G.O.P. nomination, but, Goodman argued, “if he does, wow, you’ll be the first major elected G.O.P.er from Florida at the table.” The bet, of course, succeeded. Trump wiped out the opposition, and Bondi secured a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. Her address to delegates did not stint on contempt for Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. “Lock her up,” she said, pointing to a sign attacking Clinton. “I love that.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Bondi had no compunction about echoing Trump’s stolen-election claims, promoting what she called “evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots,” and joining the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani at the infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping news conference. Trump fomenting an insurrection on January 6th did not lessen her support; in 2021, she chaired two Trump-affiliated committees, earning more than two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Two years later, after Trump was indicted for trying to change the outcome of the 2020 election in Georgia, Bondi told Hannity that, once Trump returned to office, “the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones.” In 2024, in addition to being a fixture on the campaign trail for Trump, Bondi was an observer at his Manhattan trial relating to his hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. When he was convicted on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records, Bondi reached a different verdict. It was, she proclaimed, “a sad day for our justice system.”