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President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday, ending her catastrophic 14-month reign over the Department of Justice. Bondi worked relentlessly to pervert the DOJ’s mission, immolating decades of hard-won institutional integrity as she refashioned the agency as an enforcement arm of Trump’s vindictive agenda. Yet even this subservience was not enough to save her job, as the president found her insufficiently effective as a hatchet woman for his campaign of political retribution.

On this week’s episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed Bondi’s corruption of the Justice Department, the abuses that followed, and the embarrassing defeats that prevented her from satisfying Trump. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: So what will the history books say about Pam Bondi? She is, I would speculate, certainly the worst attorney general in history, someone who makes Jeff Sessions look stellar by comparison.

Mark Joseph Stern: Bondi’s legacy was atrocious. It is always welcome to see someone so profoundly malicious leave the government, even if she got booted because she wasn’t evil enough. This is the woman who abolished the Justice Department’s independence from the White House and declared that she would be doing the president’s bidding directly. That is not how the Justice Department has traditionally operated,........

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