Pam Bondi Didn’t Ruin The Justice Department Fast Enough For Donald Trump

WASHINGTON ― While the public face of Donald Trump’s radical reshaping of the Department of Justice into a weapon to attack his critics is changing, the policy behind it, legal experts said, almost certainly will not.

Trump has given no indication he is ready to stop harassing and prosecuting political opponents, and the former prosecutors and intelligence officials who participated in the various investigations into his actions as president. Indeed, outgoing Attorney General Pam Bondi appears to have been fired because she didn’t successfully go after that enemies list aggressively enough.

“Trump has attempted to bend DOJ to his will and turn it into his personal law firm, including by putting his defense lawyers into the top jobs. Bondi smashed through norms and laws to please him but evidently that was not enough,” said Norm Eisen, a top lawyer in Barack Obama’s White House.

And the interim choice for the job, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, is publicly as committed to harming Trump’s perceived enemies as much as Trump. The names floated as possible replacements ― including EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee ― are similarly gung-ho about prosecuting the president’s bête noires.

“Trump will not appoint anyone of character, and as evil as Bondi was, she wasn’t evil enough for Trump,” said Ty Cobb, a former federal prosecutor who served in Trump’s White House Counsel’s office in his first term. “He will search for someone who is.”

Trump posted on social media Thursday thanking Bondi for her year in office, announcing she was “transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.” His post made no mention of her inability to put his critics in prison.

Just six months ago, though, Trump implored her to do exactly that in an earlier post, specifically naming former FBI director James Comey, California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” Trump wrote. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Bondi further failed to cover up Trump’s deep entanglement with the deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, she may have made it worse for her boss by drawing additional attention to their friendship by initially boasting that she would make public all the DOJ’s investigatory files in the case, and then abruptly reversing course and announcing there was nothing more to release.

In February, Bondi made a spectacle of herself testifying before Congress, insulting members as she offered a full-throated defense of Trump, claiming they had no business asking questions about Epstein given the performance of the stock market.

“Because Donald Trump, the Dow, the Dow right now is over ― the Dow is over 50,000. I don’t know why you’re laughing,” she said.

“You cannot win with that job,” said one prominent Republican in Florida, where Bondi was twice elected the state’s attorney general. He added he had no explanation for why Trump chose to act now, as opposed to immediately after the congressional hearing when the public mockery of her performance was in full swing. “We’re trying to explain the unexplainable.”

Bondi’s replacement, at least in the interim, has already been more aggressive on both of Trump’s key demands. Last weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche boasted of having purged the department of those who investigated Trump.

“There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” he said, adding that the FBI had done the same thing.

Blanche, who prior to his current job was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer in his various cases, has also defended Trump’s relationship with Epstein: “It’s not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.” He also transferred Epstein’s partner-in-pedophilia and longtime Trump friend Ghislaine Maxwell from a prison in Florida to a “Club Fed” type camp in Texas last year.

Trump, as he promised during his campaign to regain his job, has openly used the Justice Department to do to his political “enemies” what Richard Nixon tried to do in secret, and for which he was in the process of getting impeached when he preempted it by resigning.

One of the three articles of impeachment the House Judiciary Committee adopted in 1974 was abuse of power for Nixon’s use of federal agencies, including the FBI, to go after his political opponents. Nixon wound up resigning the presidency that August, before the full House could impeach him, after learning from Senate Republican leaders that the upper chamber was likely to convict him and remove him from office.

Trump was charged by federal prosecutors for his actions related to his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt to remain in power despite having lost the 2020 election, and also for taking secret documents with him to his Mar-a-Lago country club in Florida and refusing to turn them over despite a subpoena. Trump, with Blanche’s help, was able to persuade millions of his followers that the prosecutions for those actions constituted improper “lawfare.”

“We will see what even more self-abasing flunky Trump comes up with,” Eisen said. “And whether the Senate rubber stamps him or her as it did Bondi.”