At her confirmation hearing in January, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to reassure senators about the job she would do as the nation’s top federal law-enforcement officer. Her “overriding objective,” Bondi said, would be to “return the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe and vigorously enforcing the law.”
Her stated priorities were standard fare: stopping violent criminals, gangs, child predators, drug traffickers, and “terrorists and other foreign threats.” Bondi also pledged to return the Justice Department to defend the “foundational rights of all Americans” and to “make America safe again.” “Lastly, and most importantly, if confirmed, I will work to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice—and each of its components,” Bondi said. “Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end. America must have one tier of justice for all.”
By any reasonable standard, including her own, Bondi’s tenure has been a cataclysmic failure. Her first year as attorney general has seen the Justice Department hollowed out by waves of firings and resignations. Her political appointees have misled federal judges, botched high-profile criminal cases, and embarrassed the Trump administration on multiple occasions. Whatever reputation the department once had for competence and integrity is now in tatters.
Bondi’s tenure began with a ham-fisted plot concocted by her underlings and Tom Homan, the White House’s “border czar,” to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his help with federal immigration enforcement. So cartoonishly obvious was this scheme that a federal judge only granted the department’s motion by dismissing the charges with prejudice, meaning that they couldn’t use the threat of refiling them as illicit leverage. Multiple top prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan resigned rather than take part in the chicanery. Adams’s political career ended in disgrace and New Yorkers elected a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who refused to cooperate at all.
The Adams plot came after Bondi had issued a department-wide memo pledging to “restore the integrity and credibility” of the department after the supposed abuses of the Biden era. “No one who has acted with a righteous spirit and just intentions has any cause for concern about efforts to root out corruption and weaponization,” she claimed.
That turned out to be untrue. Shortly before Bondi took over, her allies purged dozens of attorneys and staffers who worked on cases involving the January 6 attack on the Capitol and on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into then-former President Donald Trump. Even the career staffers who were not involved in major decisions were not spared from the revenge campaign.
“On the other hand, the Department of Justice will not tolerate abuses of the criminal justice process, coercive behavior, or other forms of misconduct,” Bondi’s memo continued. To the contrary, the last year has shown that the Bondi-led Justice Department will not only tolerate those actions, but actively pursue and encourage them.
Under Bondi’s watch, Justice Department officials have sought to coerce the nation’s top universities into submitting to legally binding “compacts.” These mafia-like offers run afoul of First Amendment protections by threatening trumped-up civil-rights investigations or the withholding of federal funds unless universities bow to Trump’s demands. This campaign mirrored other administration efforts to unconstitutionally bully law firms and media conglomerates into ideological compliance.
Perhaps the most damaging losses have come on the immigration front. In March, DOJ officials conspired to deport as many people as possible under the Alien Enemies Act without giving them an opportunity to seek relief in federal courts. Emil Bove, a top DOJ official at the time, allegedly told lawyers to defy court orders over the removals. (Bove, who is currently a federal judge, has denied any wrongdoing.)
In the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, federal immigration officials mistakenly deported the green-card holder to a Salvadoran gulag and then resisted calls to return him to the United States. Bondi’s subordinates fired Erez Reuveni, a top career attorney in the department, after he conceded error in the Abrego Garcia case during a hearing and refused to falsely tell a judge that the Salvadoran man had ties to terrorist organizations.
DOJ misconduct and irregularities have become so routine under Bondi’s watch that multiple federal judges have suggested that the department is no longer entitled to what is known as the “presumption of regularity,” meaning that federal courts will no longer assume that DOJ lawyers are acting in good faith or will take them at their word. Not once in the department’s 155-year history has its institutional reputation been worse.
Trump, for his part, wanted a different type of attorney general for his second term. DOJ’s post-Watergate tradition of autonomy and independence is now a distant memory. Bondi is expected to serve Trump’s personal and political interests first. There would be no more investigations or prosecutions, no more special counsels or grand jury subpoenas, and no more “witch hunts” or “hoaxes.”
Even by that standard, Bondi has failed. A few weeks after being sworn in, Bondi claimed in a Fox News interview that an Epstein “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” She followed it up by appearing in front of the White House with massive binders featuring the Justice Department seal and the title “The Epstein Files: Page 1.”
Her showboating pledge to release the Epstein files soon backfired. Bondi reportedly told Trump in May that he was named multiple times in the files. In July, the FBI and Justice Department released a joint unsigned memo claiming that no further documents would be released. The sudden reversal—and a drip of damaging reports in the weeks that followed—thrust Trump into the center of the Epstein scandal for the first time.
The president’s political capital, which appeared vast when he took office, rapidly dwindled thereafter. Republicans in Congress openly defied him last month by voting to release the Epstein files despite Trump’s obstruction. (Trump capitulated at the last moment and endorsed the bill to save face.) While the Trump administration’s authoritarian tactics have not abated, the Epstein scandal shattered Trump’s post-election image of invincibility and inevitability.
Nor has Bondi been able to successfully prosecute Trump’s enemies, as he has personally and publicly demanded that she do. Her efforts to secure indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James have collapsed. A federal court ruled that her handpicked prosecutor, Lindsay Halligan, had been illegally appointed and dismissed the cases. Halligan’s amateur-hour procedural mistakes could doom the Comey case; a federal grand jury in Virginia has since taken the extraordinary step of repeatedly refusing to reindict James.
There are three years left in Trump’s presidency. Some of his worst and most authoritarian desires may yet come to pass. Thanks to Bondi, many of them have not. The Justice Department’s reputation today is not one of “confidence” or “integrity,” as Bondi pledged, but a self-defeating mix of malfeasance, corruption, arrogance, and astounding incompetence. Above all else, the department’s failures exude one thing that Trump truly can’t stand: weakness.
