Pam Bondi said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted.’ She’s Trump’s AG pick.
Again and again, when Donald Trump has faced scandal and scrutiny, Pam Bondi was there to defend him.
Bondi said the Justice Department’s special counsel investigation into whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 election needed to be dissolved. She declared that the 45th president’s first impeachment in 2019 was a “sham.” And when Trump was indicted four times after leaving office, Bondi was blunt about who deserved legal scrutiny - and it wasn’t the former president.
“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi declared on Fox News in 2023, soon after Trump’s fourth set of criminal charges. “The investigators will be investigated.”
Bondi, a former Florida state attorney general, is drawing newfound attention since President-elect Trump announced his plans to nominate her to lead the Justice Department as U.S. attorney general. She was tapped after Matt Gaetz, the Republican former congressman from Florida, withdrew from contention amid allegations that he had paid women, as well as a 17-year-old minor, for sex - claims he has denied.
While Bondi’s public commentary is not as incendiary as Gaetz’s confrontational rhetoric - which included calling for the FBI to be abolished - she has still served as a reliable advocate for Trump and a fierce critic of attempts to investigate or prosecute him.
Bondi joined Trump’s first impeachment defense, went on television to falsely allege cheating by Democrats when Trump lost his 2020 re-election bid to Joe Biden and appeared at a Manhattan courthouse last spring to support Trump while he stood trial on charges of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to an adult-film actress ahead of the 2016 election.
Trump, in announcing Bondi as his new pick, praised her record and said she would “refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime.”
“Attorney General Nominee Bondi is looking forward to the confirmation process and answering any questions senators might have,” Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump transition spokesman, said in a statement Friday. He added that she has dedicated her career to “keeping Americans safe. She looks forward to continuing that work at the Department of Justice.”
Criticism of Bondi’s ties to Trump date back to her tenure as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 through 2019. Bondi has said she met Trump while in college and was friendly with two of his children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump. She also endorsed Trump in the 2016 Republican primary.
That same year, Bondi defended her handling of a $25,000 donation Trump made in 2013 to a political action committee she created for her re-election campaign. Bondi had been weighing whether Florida should join a lawsuit filed by then-New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman alleging tax fraud against Trump University, a company that offered real estate training courses and was not an accredited university or college.
Bondi’s office had received 22 complaints of fraud against the company, though she later said the office considered only one of them credible. She elected not to pursue a case against Trump’s company, and a spokesman later confirmed that she had solicited the donation directly from Trump.
In 2016, after Trump emerged as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint about the donation to the Internal Revenue Service, which ruled that the gift had violated tax laws. Trump paid a fine that year.
Bondi gave a public defense of what happened, pushing back on any suggestion of wrongdoing.
“I will not let any money from anyone affect what I do,” she said at a news conference in 2016.
Pfeiffer, the transition spokesman, noted that the Florida Commission on Ethics investigated the matter and cleared Bondi, finding no probable cause she had violated any state laws.
Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at CREW, said there is no evidence that the donation contributed to Bondi’s decision not to sue Trump University, which was later shut down by a state court because of fraudulent activities. But he said the arrangement demonstrates the need for Bondi, and other Trump appointees, to undergo rigorous background checks during their Senate confirmation process to determine potential conflicts of interest.
“At the very least, they have a long and somewhat questionable relationship,” Libowitz said of Bondi and Trump. “With Trump in general, and especially with Trump in 2024, it’s unlikely that we would see him appoint anyone he does not view as a loyalist.”
Bondi’s brother, Brad Bondi, is an attorney who represented Tesla in a Securities and Exchange Commission fraud case against the company’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, a prominent Trump backer who the president-elect has named to help lead an outside advisory group aimed at reorganizing the federal bureaucracy. The Justice Department is also reportedly investigating Tesla.
Brad Bondi did not respond to a request for comment.
Dave Aronberg, the state attorney for Palm Beach County, Florida, said that Bondi will be much better for the Justice Department than Gaetz would have been. Gaetz, who never worked as a prosecutor and would have been the first U.S. attorney general in four decades without experience as a government attorney or judge, had publicly floated getting rid of the Justice Department, the FBI and other agencies if they did not change course.
“She is no political hack,” Aronberg said in an interview. “She is not taking the job to burn the DOJ down as Matt Gaetz pledged to do.”
Aronberg said he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination in the Florida attorney general election in 2010 and endorsed Bondi’s eventual general-election opponent. But Bondi still tapped him to serve as the state’s “drug czar” so they could “save lives in the opioid epidemic,” he said. Bondi pursued legal action in Florida to shut down so-called pill mills - pain clinics that liberally prescribed addictive opioids - and ban synthetic forms of heroin and acid.
“She is hands on and she is also loyal to her co-workers, meaning she’s not going to try to push anyone out because they are a Democrat or a career prosecutor who is apolitical,” Aronberg said. “She believes in the rule of law.”
Given Trump’s stated desire for retribution against his perceived foes, Aronberg said, he expects Bondi could launch investigations into past Justice Department cases involving Trump. Aronberg said he believes Bondi would follow the lead of William P. Barr, who served as attorney general for part of Trump’s first term and appointed a special counsel to investigate the origins of the Russia probe.
“I do not expect her people to initiate charges against someone without evidence,” he added.
The Washington Post reported Friday that Trump plans to fire the team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions again him, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition. Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said.
Bondi fueled other controversy while in office in Florida, including in her response to lawsuits aimed at forcing the state to honor same-sex marriages from other states before the Supreme Court upheld same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015. She had said recognizing those unions would “impose significant public harm” to Floridians, who in 2008 had approved a statewide ban on such marriages. Bondi also rigorously opposed efforts to legalize medical marijuana in the state, a position that could put her at odds with Trump, who during his campaign expressed pro-cannabis policies.
“The best hope is that she will continue to advance her prior work as a law-and-order local and state prosecutor at a federal and national level,” said Anthony V. Alfieri, a University of Miami law professor and director of that law school’s Center for Ethics and Public Service. “The worry is that her commitment to law and order will be biased or prejudiced or tilted by the political priorities of the Trump administration.”
Bondi spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016, where people chanted “Lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic foil in the election.
“Lock her up, I love that,” Bondi remarked from the stage.
She maintained her support for Trump after The Washington Post published an audio recording in October 2016 of Trump boasting about grabbing women by their vaginas. Bondi said the comments were “disgusting” but that Trump was apologetic.
She was a vocal critic of the Russia probe during Trump’s first term in office, appearing on Fox News to dismiss the investigation as one-sided. At least once, however, Bondi couched her criticism within a broader defense of federal law enforcement.
“There are about 40,000 great men and women of the FBI throughout this country,” Bondi said. “And there are a few bad ones in the Justice Department who are making the rest look bad. And that’s not fair to those great men and women who are out there risking their lives every day.”
After leaving office in 2021, Trump was indicted in separate state cases in New York and Georgia and in federal cases in Florida and D.C. Only the New York case has gone to trial. Bondi - who had criticized the Manhattan district attorney and the judge overseeing the case - joined other allies in attending the trial to show support for Trump, the first former president ever charged with crimes.
She attended proceedings on May 21, the day Trump’s defense rested. His entourage in court that day included Matthew G. Whitaker, who had been acting attorney general for part of Trump’s first term and is now his pick to be the U.S. ambassador to NATO.
After a jury voted to convict Trump on 34 counts later that month, Bondi went on Fox News with a mournful assessment.
“A tremendous amount of trust is lost in the justice system tonight,” she said.
She then offered a silver lining, pointing to a flood of financial donations to Trump’s presidential campaign as a result of the jury’s verdict.
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Chris Dehghanpoor contributed to this report.
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Video: Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi praised Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention. Bondi said foe Hillary Clinton’s security clearance deserved to be taken away.(c) 2024 , The Washington Post
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