The One Thing Trump Wanted That Pam Bondi Failed to Deliver

Mr. Toobin is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.”

President Trump had many good reasons to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi. He picked the single bad one.

When the president announced Ms. Bondi’s departure from his Cabinet today, he offered the customary false praise and cold comfort that accompany such defenestrations. But the core of Mr. Trump’s dissatisfaction with the attorney general was apparently her failure to serve his need for revenge against his enemies. She did not prosecute enough of Mr. Trump’s adversaries, and the cases she did bring were failures.

In a Sept. 20, 2025, message to Ms. Bondi that President Trump posted on Truth Social, he complained that “nothing is being done” about his demand for prosecutions of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote. In apparent response, Ms. Bondi’s Justice Department did later bring transparently defective cases against Mr. Comey (for lying to Congress) and Ms. James (for mortgage fraud). Both prosecutions were promptly and properly dismissed, but the Justice Department is appealing.

These cases were among Ms. Bondi’s worst abuses of the legal system since her appointment, and judges have checked her. But her Justice Department has more such abusive investigations in the works. There is, for example, a federal grand jury probe underway in Florida that is apparently aimed at the Obama-era officials who began the investigation of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Mr. Trump and his allies have also demanded a prosecution of Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought indictments against President Trump in 2023.

The fact that Ms. Bondi has failed in these abusive prosecutorial efforts is cause for relief, not dismissal. It’s the rest of her record that has turned the Justice Department into an oxymoron that will take years, if not decades, to fix.

Ms. Bondi herself has been a terrible spokesperson and symbol of the department — disrespectful of its honorable traditions, dismissive of critics, intolerant of dissent — and this was demonstrated most clearly with her inept handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter. After Ms. Bondi misled the country about her initial disclosures in the case, Congress responded by passing a law forcing the Justice Department to release its files on the pedophile and his allies. Ms. Bondi’s delayed, inconsistent and generally incompetent response to the law achieved the seemingly impossible goal of uniting congressional Democrats and Republicans — in disgust with her performance. (Evidently, Mr. Trump was unimpressed as well.)

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Jeffrey Toobin is a former assistant U.S. attorney who writes about the intersection of law and politics. He is the author of “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court,” “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy” and other books.

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