Pam Bondi is out as Attorney General — but the damage she has done to the DOJ is profound
Attorney General Pam Bondi, testifying before a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Capitol Hill on Feb. 11, was fired by President Donald Trump on Thursday.
President Donald Trump has used the Department of Justice as if it were his own personal law firm. And Pam Bondi, in her zeal to help her boss, often seemed as if she were Trump’s personal lawyer, a role she once played, instead of the attorney general of the United States.
Until she was fired on Thursday, Bondi was perhaps the strongest sycophantic stooge of Trump’s second administration. And the worst attorney general in my lifetime.
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Let’s look at her record.
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Bondi hit the ground running. On her first day, she created a “weaponization working group” focused on, as she said in her Senate confirmation hearing, restoring “the credibility and integrity of the Department of Justice.” She singled out special prosecutor Jack Smith and New York prosecutors Alvin Bragg and Letitia James for “the pursuit of improper investigative tactics and unethical prosecutions,” specifically around the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Ed Martin, a leading election denier who fired 30 of the Jan. 6 prosecutors during his brief tenure as acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was soon forced out by the Senate. Within a week, Bondi had named him to head her weaponization group.
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At Trump’s behest, Bondi has since fired people left and right, including: the three remaining senior prosecutors who had worked on the Jan. 6 cases; 20 department non-lawyer staff members........
