The Job of Attorney General Is Not What We Think It Is

Before we get too upset with Pam Bondi, let’s think a minute.

John F. Di Leo | April 4, 2026

In her one short year on the job, Pam Bondi has been very successful in many ways.

Her DoJ has successfully defended the administration against a barrage of lawfare, including winning 24 defenses at the Supreme Court.

Her DoJ has likely done more damage to drug cartels and other transnational organized crime groups than any in the past.

Her DoJ has successfully secured agreements with a number of major universities to end bigoted practices and make reparations for past offenses.

Her DoJ has led a bunch of major busts of human-trafficking networks and other kinds of immigrant-related financial criminals, from Medicaid fraud to daycare and nursing home fraud, much of which is still in the early stages but all of which promises to total tens of billions of dollars in revealed fraud against the American taxpayer.

And all this was accomplished while doing the usual job of a federal A.G.: staffing the U.S. attorneys’ offices, finding and supporting new judges for federal vacancies, and similar “ordinary” tasks. 

That’s just in one year. 

Granted, we had reasons to be dissatisfied, too:  

Why haven’t the criminals involved in the “Russian collusion” hoax and so many other such illegal federal witch hunts in recent years been prosecuted yet?

Why haven’t the people responsible for framing and persecuting the January 6 protesters been prosecuted?

Why haven’t the mayors, county executives, and governors who violated their constituents’ constitutional rights during the COVID-19 panic been prosecuted?

Why hasn’t more vote fraud been prosecuted? 

These are legitimate questions, but they all point to a reality that perhaps the American public — especially the conservative movement — has not accepted, even if we know it in our hearts. 

We think of the Attorney General as “America’s top prosecutor.”  It’s been the popularly accepted nickname for the office for generations.  But is it really the right way to look at the job? 

We look at the position as a federal version of the state-level attorney general, and of the county-level district attorney.  But the federal attorney general isn’t that narrowly focused a role anymore.  It hasn’t been for generations. 

In addition to those two obvious jobs — the vetting and selection of potential judges for a president to nominate as vacancies arise, and the appointment and operation of the U.S. attorneys in the 94 districts — there are tons of other responsibilities in this office that bear only the most tangential similarity to those county and statewide offices of similar names. 

Take a look at the public organizational chart of the Department of Justice sometime; it’s available on the DoJ website.   

There’s an Antitrust Division to consider corporate skullduggery such as illegal monopoly activity and the question of whether mergers should be allowed or disallowed, and there’s an Executive Office for U.S. Trustees that manages all our nation’s bankruptcy cases. 

There’s an Environment and National Resources Division that looks into concerns that someone somewhere might be violating our nation’s environmental laws or might be squandering or abusing our natural resources. 

There’s a Community Oriented Policing Services office that manages the leftist-inspired effort to turn the police of our nation’s most dangerous cities into social workers. 

There’s the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATF), which handles everything from import filings of people importing wine and beer to the federal registration of firearms dealers and the monitoring of cigarette packages to make sure the printer didn’t forget to include the surgeon general’s warning on the side. 

There’s the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which employs some 10,000 agents, researchers, and chemists to identify and combat the producers and dealers of illegal drugs all over the world. 

There's a Bureau of Prisons, which employs 34,000 people, from wardens and guards to doctors and teachers, from the management of real estate and facilities to the purchasing and management of their supplies, meeting the needs of some 154,000 inmates in federal penitentiaries. 

There’s an Office of Tribal Justice, managing the legal and civil rights–related challenges of American Indians, whether on Indian Nations’ reservations or not. 

There's an Office on Violence Against Women and a Civil Rights Division, both of which have different meanings and emphases depending on who holds the White House. 

Did we mention the U.S. Marshalls and the Federal Bureau of Investigation?  Those are in there, too. 

And there’s more.  So much more.  But that’s a snapshot of the problem. 

The Department of Justice, like most federal departments, in fact, is overgrown with agencies, many of which probably shouldn’t exist at all, but at some point, somewhere along the way, Congress created them, and had to put them somewhere.  

So some of these agencies might have fit equally well in the Departments of the Interior or Treasury or Homeland Security or State, but they had to put them somewhere, so the wise old minds of Congress cast lots — or threw dice or read tea leaves — and decided to put them in the department administered by the attorney general. 

As a result, we have a Cabinet-level department that’s part police, part prosecutor, part chemist, part purchasing agent, part accountant, part diplomat, and part spy. 

How do you select a Cabinet secretary to manage all that? 

It’s not that it can’t be done.  We found people who could be good managers of Treasury when that department administered the U.S. Mint, the IRS, the Coast Guard, and the Customs Service.  We found people who could be good managers of HEW when that department administered a public health service, the FDA, the Social Security Administration, and even some hospitals.  

So we can certainly find someone to manage Justice, too — but we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that it’s just a bigger, costlier, fancier version of a state attorney general’s office. 

Either we need to break up the Department of Justice into pieces, putting the non-A.G. offices into other Cabinet departments (or just shut down a bunch of these pointless bureaucracies outright), or we need to admit that this is not a job for a prosecutor; it’s a job for a CEO, much like most of the other secretaries’ jobs are, in fact. 

Pam Bondi tried to wear these many hats, and she did fine with some but perhaps wasn’t right for others.  Or perhaps she would have been fine for all of them, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. 

There’s another area in which Justice is unique.  In most Cabinet departments, the lion’s share of the staff is non-political; once you replace the political appointees at the top with new blood, the rest of the staff will follow the new administration’s orders.   

It’s not like that at Justice. 

Look back at that list of offices. Many of them, perhaps most, attract a certain type of person, often a lawyer whose heart and soul are dedicated to a certain political cause.  You believe in protecting either victims or criminals.  Either you try to be colorblind or you imagine racism everywhere.  Either you believe in the free market or you believe in top-down central planning. 

A new Democrat attorney general can walk into that office confident that 80% or more of that department’s bureaucracy is on his side already.  A Republican attorney general walks in knowing that he will be fought tooth and nail as reforms are attempted, every step of the way. 

This isn’t a job for a prosecutor.  It’s a job for a disruptor.  A fighter.  A general. 

What we need there is another Pete Hegseth, another Marco Rubio, another Elon Musk. 

And if we can’t find one, we need to dial down our expectations, because demanding the impossible of a good patriot who’s already giving her all doesn’t really help anybody. 

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, consultant and public speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his biting political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his collection of essays on public policy in the 2020s, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.

Image: Pam Bondi.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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