Pam Bondi Puts Loyalty to Trump First
The disturbing priorities revealed in the attorney general nominee’s answers—and non-answers.
IF THESE WERE “NORMAL” TIMES, Pam Bondi almost certainly would not be confirmed as attorney general. But these are far from normal times, and with her leading the Department of Justice under a re-elected Donald Trump, the times are likely to get a whole lot less normal.
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee began confirmation hearings for the former Florida attorney general Trump picked after the catastrophic collapse of his first choice for U.S. attorney general, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, because of an investigation by the House Ethics Committee into allegations that Gaetz paid for sex, including with a minor, and used illegal drugs while a member of Congress. Although it’s almost certain that Bondi will be confirmed, there are at least three disqualifying issues with her candidacy.
1. Potentially Grave Conflicts of Interest
Bondi is a career prosecutor who served as Florida’s 37th and first female attorney general from 2011 to 2019, after which she became a lobbyist for Ballard Partners in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office. Her thirty corporate and foreign clients included General Motors, Uber, Major League Baseball, and Carnival North America. The Department of Justice is currently investigating two of her other clients, Amazon and the GEO Group, the latter of which is a private prison company that stands to benefit heavily from mass deportations. Bondi’s firm also represents many other clients with business before DOJ, such as Boeing, Blackstone, and Google. Bondi also lobbied for a Kuwaiti firm and was registered as a foreign agent for the government of Qatar.
In her Senate nominee questionnaire, Bondi failed to disclose any of these potential conflicts of interest. Bondi nonetheless emphasized during her testimony that she will not play politics as attorney general. When pressed about acting as a registered foreign agent, she insisted that the $115,000 monthly retainer was spread across several people at the firm and that she is proud of the work she did for Qatar.
Bondi has yet to account for what is perhaps the biggest stain on her credibility as a rule-of-law prosecutor. In 2013, Trump’s charitable foundation donated $25,000 to And Justice for All, a PAC linked with Bondi. This donation came three days after a spokeswoman for the Florida attorney general’s office said that Bondi was reviewing allegations against get-rich-quick seminars associated with Trump contained in a lawsuit by the state of New York. The lawsuit alleged that Trump University and its affiliates were “sham for-profit” colleges and ripped off 5,000 consumers. Bondi subsequently declined to join the lawsuit against Trump University and backed Trump in defending the donation.
In 2016, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint about the donation with the IRS. In response, the Trump Foundation claimed—implausibly—that it had made an error and that it had actually intended the donation to go not to Bondi’s And Justice for All PAC but rather to a similarly named Kansas-based anti-abortion nonprofit, Justice for All. In June 2016, as Bondi faced increased criticism over the issue, her spokesperson stated that Bondi had in fact solicited the donation from Trump several weeks before her office had announced their contemplation of joining the Trump University fraud lawsuit. In September 2016, the IRS determined that the donation violated laws against nonprofit organizations making political contributions and ordered Trump to pay a fine for the contribution and to reimburse the foundation for the sum that had been donated to Bondi. Neither Bondi nor her PAC were fined or criminally charged.
As Bondi well knows, Rule 1.7 of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct makes clear that “loyalty and independent judgment are essential elements in the lawyer’s relationship to a client” and that “concurrent conflicts of interest can arise from the lawyer’s responsibilities to another client, a former client or a third person or from the lawyer’s own interests.” Prosecutors pick and choose which cases to pursue and which to drop. The law and facts are rarely cut and dry. So far, Bondi has not adequately addressed concerns that she might put her foot on the gas or pump the brakes based on loyalty to corporate or foreign interests—or to the president-elect himself.
2. Adherence to the Big Lie
Bondi was repeatedly asked during the hearing whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected; she refused to answer, merely conceding that he is currently the president of the United States. When pushed, she hinted that the Pennsylvania election in 2020 had problems with fraud, a claim for which there is zero evidence. That she cannot admit that the law has spoken on that subject in her audition for the job of the nation’s top prosecutor is disturbing, to say the least.
All through the hearing, Bondi and Senate Republicans hammered the idea that DOJ has been politicized and that she’ll be the catalyst for much-needed reform. The undercurrent, of course, was that Trump was supposedly wrongly investigated and prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith. By this metric, no politician could ever be legitimately held to account for violating criminal laws because to even suggest a politician committed a crime collides head on with politics. The argument also ignores the possibility that the facts and the law pointed to criminal activity, which the attorney general has a solemn duty to pursue.
3. Refusal to Disobey Illegal or Unconstitutional Directives
Worse, Bondi refused to answer whether she would refuse to follow illegal or unconstitutional orders, defensively declaring that she has no reason to believe Trump would ask such a thing. Nor would Bondi state that she’ll decline prosecutions of former Special Counsel Jack Smith or former Rep. Liz Cheney, who has been a vocal critic of Trump and was an outspoken member of the House January 6th Committee. When Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) pursued this line of questioning, Bondi talked over her, declaring with no sense of irony that the query itself only adds to the politicization of the criminal justice system.
When asked about Trump’s characterization of the January 6th insurrectionists as “hostages” and “patriots,” Bondi claimed she was not “familiar” with those statements. This is simply not credible. She also feigned ignorance regarding Trump’s assertion that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
In Bondi’s defense, nobody who dared answer these questions differently could possibly get the job. And she did make a few promising admissions—including that presidents can only serve two terms under the Twenty-second Amendment, and that there will be no “enemies list” at the DOJ (while vigorously endorsing Kash Patel for FBI director, despite his own well-known enemies list).
Bondi, like her incoming boss, knows full well that despite what she says under oath to Congress, she will enter the Trump administration effectively above the law. We can only hope that she adheres to the values of decency that go along with what she called her favorite part of the oath of office: “under God.”
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