Bondi's Out

My girl, Attorney General Pam Bondi is out at the Justice Department. She's taken her congressional burn book and going home. After days of rumors, Trump made it official in a truth social announcement. Bondi is a great American patriot and a loyal friend who is retiring to a farm upstate where she can run and play and chase squirrels with the other MAGA lawyers who cease to be useful. Say hi to Rudy!

Bondi defended her tenure by shouting that the Dow was over 50,000 and it's been in freefall ever since, which is probably because of the war in Iran, not because of the dearly departed AG. But still, it just goes to show you can engage in displays of sycophancy so degrading they'd make a North Korean state broadcaster blush.

President, we've got had some great wins in the last few days that, you know, you were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority. The US Americans want you to be president because of your agenda.

And you can turn yourself into a recurring South Park meme about Brown nosing. And still it won't be enough to save your job. On her way out the door, Bondi tweeted that she'd overseen easily the most consequential first year of the Department of Justice in American history,

which may be true, but not in the way she thinks. Pam Bondi was not Trump's first choice for the job. That was former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, whose nomination collapsed when it became clear that not even this Congress would confirm a guy who'd been credibly accused of paying young women and girls for sex and drugs, rejected by the legislators who turned American healthcare over to Robert Kennedy.

Ouch.

So Trump turned to Bondi, who brought all of the Florida and none of the scandal. She and Trump went way back to that time when Florida State Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi was investigating Trump University for scamming students. Trump U offered courses that promised to teach customers how to make money buying and selling real estate like Donald Trump. And the Florida AG had it in her sights starting in 2011. But then, in 2013, the Trump Foundation contributed $25,000 to a political action committee supporting

Bondi's re-election, and the investigation just disappeared. Like magic. It is not legal for a charitable foundation to donate money to a PAC, and the Trump Foundation paid a $2,500 penalty to the IRS for what it described as clerical errors. Bondi claimed to know nothing about it. Eventually, the foundation was shuttered for systemic illegal conduct after a prosecution

by the Attorney General of New York. Bondi's tenure as state AG ended in 2019, after which she worked as a lobbyist for companies like Amazon, General Motors, and Geo Group, a private prison giant which was recently awarded billions of dollars in contracts to build ICE detention facilities. She also plied her trade for the nation of Qatar. And she represented

Trump at his first impeachment trial. So after Gatesgate, when Trump was in need of a loyalist who could get through the Senate, Bondi was a natural choice. She was confirmed on a 54-46 vote and sworn in on February 5, 2025. Within hours of taking office, Bondi issued a raft of policy memos prioritizing immigration enforcement, reinstating the federal death penalty, and establishing a weaponization working group to root out all the people who targeted Trump and his allies, including FBI agents and prosecutors who brought the January 6th rioters to justice.

And we are going to get to all the things that she did do, but let's take a minute to point out all the things that Bondi didn't do. Because there is a cost to focusing on immigration and political prosecutions to the exclusion of everything else. Under Bondi, the Public Integrity Section, which investigates corruption by public officials, was slashed from 35 lawyers to 5 and told to refocus on immigration and investigations

of former Biden administration officials. 75% of the Civil Rights Division is gone and has been refocused on trans kids playing sports and discrimination against white men. Bondi disbanded the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, the unit Trump's first FBI director Chris Wray created after Russia interfered in the 2016 election. She killed Task Force KleptoCapture, which had been tracking and freezing the assets

of Russian oligarchs. She gutted enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, announcing that criminal FARA charges would henceforth be reserved for conduct resembling traditional espionage, which conveniently bracketed out the kind of unregistered foreign lobbying that got Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort and national security advisor Michael Flynn into trouble.

In fact, Bondi massively dialed back prosecutions of most categories of crimes, particularly white collar crime. ProPublica reports that in February of 2025 alone, during the first weeks of Bondi's tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, that is closed, without prosecution. That is the highest monthly total since at least 2004. And in the first six months of the Trump administration, the Justice Department declined more than

23,000 criminal prosecutions, including nursing home abuses and health care fraud and antitrust cases. 5,000 drug cases went away, more than 13,000 terrorism and national security cases, 300 cases of domestic terrorism. The DOJ shut down 25 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases, which is more than the prior three incoming administrations combined, and functionally it ceased enforcing that law at all.

Trump has said for years that the FCPA, which bars American companies from bribing foreign officials, is a horrible law that should be changed. He signed an executive order pausing enforcement of the law entirely to, quote, preserve presidential foreign policy prerogatives. And by the way, Pam Bondi had a personal connection to some of the cases that got dropped by her office because after her brother Brad Bondi failed to get himself elected as president of the DC Bar Association, probably because of Devin's non-endorsement,

Brad Bondi set up shop as a lobbyist, and a lobbyist with pretty good success rate at getting federal criminal charges dismissed at the department run by his sister Pam. But okay, aside from a few little side projects, Pam Bondy spent 14 months doing everything she possibly could to make Trump happy, including trying to make his little Jeffrey Epstein files problem go away. Now, we've talked extensively on the channel about the rise of authoritarianism in the United States,

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Pay once for $300 and never again. It truly is the best deal of all. Either way, click or scan now to continue watching Legal Eagle on Nebula or we will see you in court. Jeffrey Epstein was always gonna be a problem for the Trump administration. For years, the MAGA base had been told by the influencer ecosystem, by Fox News, by Trump himself, that the Deep State had been protecting a global elite sex trafficking network for years and that

Donald Trump was the one man willing to blow the whole thing open. The problem was that Trump was pals with Epstein for a very long time and lots of people in Trump world had ties to the deceased pedophile. So job one for Pam Bondi was to manage expectations. It's sitting on my desk right now to review. So have you seen

anything there you said oh my gosh? Not yet.

Mmm so close. The next day Bondi hosted a gaggle of right-wing creators at the White House and handed them giant white binders embossed with the Department of Justice seal and the label Epstein files phase one declassified. But almost everything in there was already in the public domain, which did not make it look like they were ending this cover up. The influencers were pissed and so Bondi pivoted, blaming the FBI and claiming that she'd unearthed

a truckload of previously withheld documents at the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York.

You're looking at these documents going, these aren't all the Epstein files. You know, there were flight logs. There were names and victims' names. And we're going, where's the rest of the stuff? And that's what the FBI had turned over to us. And so a source said, whoa, all this evidence is sitting in the Southern District of New York.

So based on that, I gave them the deadline. Friday at 8, a truckload of evidence arrived. It's now in the possession of the FBI.

The problem was that Trump's name appeared thousands of times in those Epstein documents, which Bondi had the unenviable task of telling Trump in May of 2025. In July, the DOJ issued an unsigned memo stating that there was no client list and no evidence that Epstein had blackmailed anyone and that no further discussions would be appropriate or warranted. Now they tried to frame that as a move to protect Epstein's victims, but that was somewhat undercut by the fact that they simultaneously closed all the ongoing investigations into

Epstein's co-conspirators. And look, I don't know if Bondi really believed that she was going to be able to stuff that genie back in the bottle, but if she did, she was sorely mistaken because Representative Thomas Massey led a handful of House Republicans to side with old Democrats to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. And although Speaker Mike Johnson held off the vote as long as he could, the law passed

in November of 2025, giving the Justice Department 30 days to release all the Epstein files in its possession. The DOJ missed that deadline, and when millions of pages were eventually released, they were heavily redacted, sometimes to the point of uselessness.

And Bondi's performance in Congress did not help either. In February of 2026, she appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and lobbed insults at the legislators asking her about Epstein.

You don't tell me anything.

I did tell you because we saw what you did in the Senate.

You're a lawyer. Not even a lawyer. Wean, this guy has Trump derangement syndrome. He needs to get- You're a failed politician.

That's where she made her infamous comments about the Dow being over $50,000 so no one could ask about the world's most famous pedophile. She also refused to even look at the victims. Will you turn to the survivors? This is not about anybody that came before you. It is about you taking responsibility for your department of justice and the harm that it has done to the survivors who are standing right behind you and are waiting for you to turn to them and

apologize.

I'm not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics.

Representative Nancy May said Bondi handled the Epstein files in a terrible manner and made this situation far worse than it had to be for President Trump because, if you think about it, isn't Donald Trump the real victim here? But the Epstein debacle was not the only disaster of Bondi's tenure. At her confirmation hearing, Bondi promised not to weaponize the Justice Department against Trump's enemies.

There will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.

Thank you. That would be within the best traditions of the Justice Department, which has maintained for decades that prosecutors should remain separate from the White House so as not to be influenced by political considerations. But Bondi was lying. On her very first day in office, she put out a memo calling Justice Department attorneys

the President's lawyers and threatening to fire anyone who refused to advocate for the President's preferred legal position, no matter how unethical or without merit it might be. Within weeks, she had fired hundreds of attorneys and FBI agents who investigated Trump. Then her office opened investigations into former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Senator Adam Schiff,

Representative Eric Swalwell, and former intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper. In the main, these investigations started with a target and worked backward to find a crime. That's why so many of them involved mortgage paperwork, since Trump's allies were spelunking through decades of private financial documents looking for something to pin on his enemies. These investigations failed spectacularly, and they all failed in basically the same

way. That is, career prosecutors looked at these cases and said, no, that's not going to work, there's no crime here. And then Bondi sent in a political operative, usually a lawyer with no criminal experience or no recent or relevant criminal experience who screwed it up in some totally embarrassing way.

So after prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia said there's no case against former FBI director James Comey for lying to Congress or against New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, Trump pushed out the confident US Attorney Eric Siebert and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan.

Trump fired off what he thought was a DM to Bondi demanding retribution pronto because they impeached me twice and indicted me five times. Over nothing, justice must be served now. Halligan is an insurance lawyer from Florida who was part of Trump's personal legal team in the stolen documents case, and she was able to get grand juries to sign off on indictments of Comey and James. But the transcripts of her grand jury

presentation were so riddled with basic errors of criminal law that they freaked out every judge who looked at them. Eventually those cases were dismissed because Halligan was never lawfully appointed. And when real experienced prosecutors tried to present the cases again, they got no billed, which is when a grand jury refuses to issue an indictment. And remember, for grand juries, the standard of proof is much lower than at trial, and grand juries don't have to be unanimous. You know that joke about grand juries indicting a ham

sandwich? Well, actually, that was pretty much true until recently, and now not so much. In February, Pirro tried to indict five members of Congress with military and intelligence backgrounds for a social media post in which they reminded active duty service members of their duty to disobey legal orders. The grand jury unanimously told Pirro to take a hike, which has to be some kind of a record. She did manage to get a grand jury subpoena to serve on the Federal Reserve, where Fed Chair Jerome Powell has angered Trump by refusing to lower interest rates.

But that subpoena was quashed by Chief Judge James Boasberg, who said that the DOJ's justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the court can only conclude that they are pretextual. Prosecutors in Florida are still trying to build a Rococo conspiracy case against former Justice Department officials alleging some kind of grand plot to get Trump. But so far they've come up empty, which is not to say there's no harm, no foul when these

cases inevitably fall apart. Obviously, the targets of these bogus investigations have paid millions of dollars to their lawyers and lived under the stress of a potential indictment for years on end. But it also cost the Justice Department because career lawyers did not sign up to be political hacks making garbage cases so that Trump administration officials can pump out social media content.

Stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.

And that's not just true in DC. In Minnesota, much of the leadership of the U.S. Attorney's Office resigned after the murder of Renee Good when they were instructed to investigate her widow for possible obstruction rather than the agent who shot and killed Renee Good as she was driving her minivan away from the scene. Under Bondi's leadership, the Department of Justice has entered a vicious cycle of attrition. As lawyers have been asked to make increasingly terrible arguments in court, more and more of them

have tapped out and gotten jobs in the private sector. That's led to fewer lawyers with fewer qualifications handling an ever heavier workload, which is not a recipe for success in court. A federal judge in New Jersey said in March, generations of assistant US attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy it within a year. It has gotten so bad that the Department of Justice can't even recruit top talent.

It used to be that lawyers from the best schools would work a few years for big firms, then take a massive pay cut to go work at the DOJ. It was incredibly prestigious to be an assistant U.S. attorney and a huge resume booster. No more. Now you've got Justice Department officials inviting anyone with a JD and a MAGA hat to slide into their DMs and hit them up for a job. Low GPA? No worries! The DOJ will even waive the requirement that you practice law for a couple years before applying.

Come on in, newbies! The water's fine! This is Pam Bondi's legacy. The DOJ is hollowed out, with generations of experience and prestige wiped out in just over a year. But that is not why Trump fired her. In 2018, Trump waited until after the midterms to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions infuriated Trump in 2017 by recusing himself from the Russia investigation after

it emerged that Sessions had ties to the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. But even as Trump fired off mean tweets about his own AG, he let Sessions twist in the wind for more than a year because Trump worried that firing Sessions would harm Republicans in the November election. Democrats picked up 41 seats and the very next day, Sessions was out.

The Atlantic reports that Trump had planned to wait until the votes were in to shuffle his cabinet this time around, but recent events changed that math. See, Trump paid no price for firing Homeland Security Kristi Noem. In fact, Republicans and Democrats universally greeted her departure with relief, and her successor Mark Wayne Mullen was quickly confirmed.

Meanwhile, the war in Iran is wildly unpopular and looks like it may drag on into the summer. Democratic overperformance in special elections and ominous polling for Republicans mean that Republicans might actually lose the Senate. And since cabinet secretaries have to be confirmed by the Senate, Trump might not be able to get another AG confirmed for the rest of his term if he had waited too long to axe Bondi. Add in reports of Trump's constant carping that Bondi had failed to indict his enemies

or protect him from the Epstein fallout, and look, she had to know the writing was on the wall. God knows there was enough reporting that she was next on the chopping block after Noam. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Bondi hoped for just a little more time.

On Wednesday, April 1, Bondi caught a lift with Trump to the Supreme Court to attend oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case. In the car, Trump told her it was time to go, and Bondi asked for a graceful exit, maybe let her work through the summer and leave on her own terms. Instead, she got a Truth Social post

announcing that she would be transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, which is a little better than Sessions got, but not a lot. Bondi never said no, she never recused herself, she went to the mat to try and protect Trump from the Epstein docs, she tried like hell to lock up his enemies despite the total lack of legal justification, and still, she got kicked to the curb. 24 hours later, she was back in Florida

and her former allies were fighting to get her job. The candidates to replace Bondi are a motley crew. The Atlantic reports that Jeanine Pirro and Alina Haba started jockeying for the job before Bondi had even gotten the news. Pirro's tenure as US attorney in DC has been, well, less than effective. And Haba, yet another of Trump's personal lawyers, had never prosecuted a criminal case in her life before Trump tapped her to hang out in New Jersey and pretend to be a US attorney for six months.

Eventually, courts told her to knock it off and she moved to Florida. The New York Times reports that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is the likeliest candidate. In February, Trump called him our secret weapon. Zeldin would be a weird pick. He has no federal criminal experience, he never worked at the Justice Department. He appears to have practiced law for just three years before becoming a state legislator. I mean, he may be loyal, but he's certainly not qualified.

Other contenders include Harmeet Dhillon, another of Trump's former personal lawyers who currently heads up the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. She's the one responsible for reorienting the office away from discrimination against minorities and toward protecting poor, disadvantaged white dudes. She's a MAGA favorite who's willing to say literally any wacko thing on social media.

Here she is last week insisting that there is a dedicated chair at the Supreme Court for the president. That's not a thing. Dylan once bragged to the Wall Street Journal that she wakes up, scrolls through Twitter for rumors of discrimination, and then texts them to her deputies to go investigate. So however silly you think things are right now, they can definitely get worse.

Other potential candidates include Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt, who previously served as state attorney general, or current Texas AG Ken Paxton. That last one would have the convenient side effect of getting Paxton out of the Texas Senate race, where he's locked in a bitter primary runoff with sitting Republican Senator John Cornyn. But my money's on another former Trump attorney,

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Unlike all the rest of those guys, Blanche was actually a federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York. He left a highly paid gig at one of the oldest, most prestigious law firms

in the country to represent Trump in his criminal and civil cases, and Blanche has been a loyal soldier in the number two position at the DOJ during Bondi's entire tenure. After kicking Bondi to the curb, Trump made Blanche acting AG, and The Atlantic reports that Blanche hopes to stay there permanently. Blanche spent the past year parroting Trump's complaints about evil deep state actors trying to take Trump down. At a Federalist Society event last year, Blanche described the Justice Department as at war

with rogue activist judges who were restraining Trump's agenda. And at CPAC in March, he boasted that there was not a single prosecutor or agent left in the department who had worked on the cases against Trump. He also got Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell to say on tape that she'd never seen Trump be anything other than a perfect gentleman. So Blanche knows how to talk the talk,

but he spends a lot less time on TV than Bondi and he's less prone to running his mouth, promising things that he simply can't deliver. But look, whoever winds up permanently on the job will face the same structural problems that Bondi did. Because grand juries are still going to vote down garbage indictments, and judges are going to quash harassing subpoenas, and the DOJ will still be in a foul odor with the judiciary and unable to recruit top talent.

A new attorney general is not going to change any of that. But at the DOJ, they're not sad to see her go. Within hours of Bondi's firing, photos began circulating of her portrait tossed in the trash. Funny enough, Bondi boasted on TV about yanking down her predecessor's photos on day one of her tenure.

I personally took all three photos down. I'm walking down the hall with these pictures. Oh, I took them down. Oh my gosh.

Yeah, that was Laura Trump, the president's daughter-in-law. But Bondi neglected to mention in that appearance that she demoted the chief of the National Security Division, Devin DeBacker, because he hadn't yet taken down those pictures. And disrespecting an institution full of career civil servants does tend to come back and bite you, as does prostrating yourself before a leader who demands that you deliver him impossible things, no matter the cost to the institution or your own integrity or the rule of law.

It's like my grandfather always said, lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas, or I guess in Pambandi sense, wake up back in Florida with the gators.

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