The Ties That Bondi

Trump has tapped loyalist Pam Bondi for the Attorney General spot.

Trump didn’t wait long to name a replacement after his first pick for Attorney General, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, crashed and burned, not even lasting one Scaramucci.

Trump is no doubt eager to avoid another debacle, and in Pam Bondi, it feels like he has picked someone far less repellant to the GOP senators who will need to bless the nomination. GOP senators are likely relieved they don’t have to spend the first weeks of the new Congress fielding questions about Venmo payments for sex with underage girls.

So what do we know about Bondi, besides the fact she certainly looks like Trump’s type / his daughter Ivanka? Bondi is not a household name, at least not yet, so she benefits from the lack of headlines. And she certainly never paid underage teens for sex while leaving a trail of receipts on Venmo. But she does arrive waving a few red flags that should have us on guard, even while it seems clear at this point that she is unlikely to meet nearly the kind of resistance we saw with Gaetz.

In today’s piece, I’ll break down a few ways we should look at this nomination and how it might affect policy and function at the Department of Justice. It’s helpful to assess Bondi using criteria Trump would measure: loyalty, corruption and propaganda value.

A Trump team player

It’s clear where Trump’s priorities are with the Department of Justice. In a social media post, Trump announced Bondi would be shifting what he perceives as its anti-Trump focus:

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans. Not anymore. Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”

Bondi has long been inside Trump’s inner circle. She was part of his first impeachment defense team, though her legal chops were often less than impressive, as this clip shows.

In this we can take some comfort. She is much less capable as other choices would have been and therefore probably will do less damage to the institution.

But what she lacks in skill she makes up for in sycophancy. In 2020 Bondi helped push the Big Lie about a stolen election, filing voting-related lawsuits in the battleground states and falsely suggesting to reporters that votes were “being suppressed” in Pennsylvania and that they could “not count the votes properly.”

Bondi traveled to be by Trump’s side at the Manhattan criminal case over illegal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, putting in more time with him than his own daughter.

Bondi was once a Democrat but converted to Republicanism and then to Trumpism. She currently is in charge of the law and justice division of the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank with close connections to Trump’s transition team. As Politico aptly described it, that institute is like a Trump administration in waiting.

At Justice, Bondi will be joined by other Trump loyalists who previously served on Trump’s defense team. As the New York Times reported, Trump has

named Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, two experienced former federal prosecutors who took the lead in defending Mr. Trump at his state trial in Manhattan and against two federal indictments, to fill the No. 2 and No. 3 positions in the department.

A third lawyer, D. John Sauer, who was the Missouri solicitor general and oversaw Mr. Trump’s appellate battles, was chosen to represent the department in front of the Supreme Court as the U.S. solicitor general.

In other words, if Bondi is confirmed as expected, Trump’s personal lawyers will now fill the top positions at Justice, cementing his hold there. If and when Trump seeks retribution against his political enemies, he now has a loyal cabal in charge of the Department to carry out his wishes.

One further thought on shifting power and alliances within Trump’s inner circle: As the former GOP Attorney General of Florida, Bondi interacted frequently with and is still close to Trump’s new chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who once headed up Ron DeSantis’s campaign. In yesterday’s piece, I noted that if Gaetz departed, there would be some finger-pointing within the Trump team over the debacle. Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn had been the one pushing for Gaetz, getting Trump to pick him while Wiles wasn’t even present. (Wiles was in another part of Trump’s plane when the decision was made, and she can’t have been too happy about that.) Trump’s choice of Bondi is a win for Wiles, who will now have a key ally in place in the position Trump has accorded his highest priority.

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My friend and fellow activist attorney Tristan Snell, who writes the Taking Down Trump newsletter, was at the New York Attorney General’s office in August of 2013, the same time Bondi was the Florida AG. Snell had sued Trump University for $42 million for defrauding Trump U enrollees. The Florida AG’s office had expressed interest in joining the case against Trump. After all, Florida had one of the largest numbers of fraud victims of Trump U.

But as Snell recounts in a thread, while he was prosecuting Trump U, Bondi was busy collecting political donations, including from Trump. Specifically, in an email at the end of August 2013, Trump’s assistant communicated with Bondi’s campaign finance director to arrange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi's PACs.

Suddenly, the Florida AG’s office was no longer keen to join the case, completely ghosting Snell and his team. They never heard from anyone from that office again. Snell later learned that Trump had sent a $25,000 check to Bondi’s PAC with a note, “Dear Pam, You are the greatest!” The check had even come, illegally, from the Trump Foundation, a nonprofit charity the Trumps once ran that has since been shut down by the New York AG’s office.

There has been much speculation whether the donation, which was so curiously timed, directly caused Bondi to kill any interest by her office in joining the Trump U fraud case. At the very least, it created a big cloud of suspicion, even while both Trump and Bondi denied the donation had any relation to the decision not to join the case.

Money seems to matter a lot to Bondi, so much so that she once requested and succeeded in obtaining a postponement in a prisoner’s execution so that she (checks notes) could attend a political fundraiser. Bondi later apologized for that request and rescheduling.

As a transactional boss, Trump no doubt appreciates that Bondi will act corruptly—or at least be willing to operate in ethical gray areas—in exchange for money and access. Bondi could soon become the most powerful law enforcement official in the country, and given their prior history, there likely will be little daylight between what Trump wants and what Bondi will agree to do.

The constraints, where they might exist, will largely be institutional in nature. As more of an “establishment” figure than Gaetz ever was, Bondi will proceed more cautiously and will prove less willing to burn the whole thing to the ground.

In this we can take a bit of comfort. Bondi is more a Bill Barr type, willing to bend nearly every rule to help her boss. But as an ambitious type, she will also have one eye on her post-Trump future, so she may seek to simply test the limits of any guardrails rather than break them outright.

The face of Trumpism

Bondi has appeared recently at Trump campaign rallies as a surrogate, perhaps to help underscore the support he has from white women. And with Wiles as Chief of Staff, Bondi as Attorney General, Kristi Noem as head of Homeland Security, Linda McMahon as Education Secretary, Karoline Leavitt as incoming Press Secretary and Rep. Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador, white women will often be the ones soft-pedaling Trumpism to the public and the world.

Trump appreciates the ruthlessness many of his top female advisors and cabinet picks have shown, and Bondi likely will be no exception. As Attorney General, Bondi will need to put a positive gloss on some key but distasteful Justice Department moves, including axing any investigations or cases now pending against Trump and defending his administration for its inevitable overreach on migrants and the border.

Further, if, as expected, Trump begins to move against the availability of abortion medication, either through enforcement of the long dormant Comstock Act or through actions by the FDA to restrict its availability, Bondi will be the face of the administration there, too.

And when you think about it, having a woman in charge of defending laws and rules that strip away women’s rights and access to reproductive care is so very…Trumpian.