President Trump wanted his Department of Justice to prosecute and put in jail former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Representative Adam Schiff, and numerous of his other political enemies. That effort has largely failed. So Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday. Her replacement is likely to be just as horrible and corrupt, but her dismissal is the latest sign of Trump’s growing weakness and the successful resistance to his authoritarian aims.
Trump did not explain exactly why he sacked Bondi, who will be replaced for now by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal lawyer. But reports from The New York Times and NBC News suggest that the president was frustrated by Bondi’s handling of the files associated with Jeffrey Epstein and her failure to win convictions against James and others hated by Trump.
The president had publicly complained in the fall about Bondi’s inability to prosecute his enemies. In a Truth Social post in September that reportedly Trump intended to send as a direct message to Bondi, he wrote:
Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” … We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!
Federal prosecutors under Bondi’s purview did not even file formal charges against many of Trump’s political foes. Comey and James were indicted, but a federal judge later dismissed both cases on the grounds that the U.S. attorney who had led the prosecutions was improperly in that post, rendering her decisions invalid.
Trump is reportedly also frustrated with Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files. This has become a debacle, with even congressional Republicans suggesting that Bondi has not released some documents quickly enough.
Bondi’s firing comes almost exactly a month after Trump fired another high-profile member of his team, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The former South Dakota governor seems to have gotten the lion’s share of the blame inside the administration for the deeply unpopular federal intervention in Minnesota, which resulted in the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
While the exact circumstances of these firings are different, they are illustrative of a broader reality: Trump’s policy goals are being stalled, and he’s increasingly unpopular. He appears to be reverting to the pattern of his first term, firing top officials instead of considering whether the president himself is the problem.
I don’t want to be too celebratory here. Blanche is likely to continue to run DOJ as Trump’s personal law firm, as Bondi did. Trump reportedly wants Lee Zeldin, who is currently administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to be Bondi’s eventual replacement. It’s possible that Blanche or Zeldin would be as committed as Bondi to using the DOJ as a means to prosecute Trump’s enemies, and perhaps be more successful.
Nonetheless, in her year in office, Bondi did a lot of damage. The department dropped about 23,000 cases of white-collar crime, terrorism, and other offenses to exclusively focus on immigration cases, according to a recent ProPublica report. Even if Comey and James were not convicted, it’s scary and ominous that the DOJ sought and won indictments of people on trumped-up charges just because the president dislikes them. There have been mass resignations in the department’s civil rights division. Bondi essentially stopped all prosecutions of political corruption. She was one of the worst attorney generals in American history, and the shortness of her tenure should not diminish its horribleness.
And most importantly, Trump is still in office. As long as we have a president who views the Department of Justice as a tool to punish his enemies and exonerate his friends, we’re in trouble. Pam Bondi is gone, but Trump’s horribly mistaken vision of the DOJ will endure for another three years.
