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.

Get Digital Access and Stay Informed With Trusted Local News.

Get Digital Access and Stay Informed With Trusted Local News.

Let’s look at her record.

Article continues below this ad

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.

See more S.F. Chronicle on Google

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 who had supported the Jan. 6 team; scores of immigration judges, all Justice Department employees, including 12 of 21 San Francisco immigration judges and just a month into her tenure, the head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, the department’s chief ethics officer, a position that remains vacant today.

These firings are devastating, but more importantly, they’ve had devastating consequences. Bondi’s termination orders have led to others leaving in droves.

Article continues below this ad

In San Francisco, several immigration judges who weren’t fired resigned at the end of 2025 because, as one judge described it, the court had become a “deportation factory” that was “an unbearable place to work.” There are only three immigration judges left in San Francisco. The result: unconscionably high caseloads in immigration courts, and, since the remaining judges are the only ones acceptable to the Trump administration, the rate of deportations has more than doubled.

Then Attorney General Pam Bondi, second left, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, third left, ride a U.S. Coast Guard motor lifeboat after visiting to Alcatraz Island on July 17, 2025.

Across the Department of Justice, out of a workforce of that was 10,000 attorneys, at least 5,500 employees have left their jobs since Bondi became AG, according to an American Bar Association report.  Not all who left are lawyers, but the department’s legal staff has been dangerously decimated.

The priorities of the department have been upended. An open letter in October from 295 former employees put it plainly: “The Justice Department cannot uphold the rule of law when it carries out the President’s retribution campaign and protects his allies; violates court orders and evades due process requirements; directs attorneys to violate their ethical responsibilities; and fires its employees without notice or cause. It also cannot keep our country safe.”

It’s true that the Department of Justice no longer keeps America safe. With energy spent tripling immigration prosecutions, obtaining indictments against Trump’s enemies and carrying out Trump’s priorities, the ordinary business of our most important law enforcement agency has been shunted aside. Instead of prosecuting cases, attorneys in the already severely understaffed department were told to spend time reviewing every case in their caseload to “give us stats to make ourselves look good,” in the words of one former prosecutor.

The result, according to Pro Publica, was that after Bondi’s confirmation, 11,000 pending cases were summarily dropped in her first month alone — several times the usual case closure rate. In the year since, while immigration filings increased, the department has declined to prosecute drug, white collar crime and corruption, violent crime, and, surprisingly, even terrorist cases at unprecedented levels. The department’s civil rights now prosecutes diversity and inclusion instead of protecting it and has lost 75% of its lawyers.

Even what Bondi tried to accomplish under orders from Trump didn’t work out. Bondi appointed Lindsey Halligan, a Trump lawyer with zero prosecution experience, to obtain the indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and James, New York’s attorney general. The effort ended in disaster: dismissal of the cases, and soon after, the dismissal of Halligan. And Bondi’s efforts to circumvent the rules to appoint another former Trump attorney, Alina Habba, as U.S. attorney for New Jersey ended in Habba’s dismissal.  

When Bondi tried to take over the Washington, D.C., police department last summer, installing Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator Terrence C. Cole as an emergency police commissioner and telling local officers, “You must comply.” D.C. filed a lawsuit against her, and within a few days, she had to back down.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

Read more about our transparency and ethics policies

Bar complaints have been mounting against Trump’s entourage of Justice Department lawyers, and there’s no longer any internal ethics review. Still, Bondi proposed a new rule that would prevent state disciplinary authorities, who have clear authority to discipline federal lawyers, from investigating their conduct until the Justice Department does an internal — and ill-defined — review that could take years. This effort, too, will not succeed.

Bondi leaves a catastrophic legacy. The Department of Justice no longer functions as an effective law enforcement agency. The president’s special interests and skewed priorities now control the department’s work. And thousands of honorable employees who have refused to accept what was taking place have resigned. Even taking the most optimistic view of a future after Trump, it will likely take decades for the DOJ to fully recover.

Richard Zitrin is an emeritus professor of legal ethics at  UC College of the Law San Francisco. His latest book is “Trial Lawyer: A Life Representing People Against Power.”

© San Francisco Chronicle