Trump Fires Attorney General Pam Bondi

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0:44Or Kelly and Jana, who were way overdue for a night out. Because sometimes comfort comes from having another woman with you. Request women drivers with women preferences on Uber. Learn more on the Uber app. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Melissa Murray in for Ari Melber. And we start tonight with a major shakeup at the Department of Justice. President Trump has fired Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi after just a 14-month tenure leading the DOJ. Bondi is now the second member of Trump's cabinet to be forced out in the second term. Bondi reportedly ended up in the president's crosshairs for a couple of reasons, principally her handling of the DOJ's Epstein files.

1:31We'll have more on that later. Also an issue was her failure to successfully prosecute the president's political foes. Let's take a look at how some of that played out. Trump putting extraordinary pressure on his attorney general, Pam Bondi, publicly calling on her to use the power of the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. Notable cases include two failed attempts to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James. Today's ruling means, at least for now, both cases will be dismissed. Federal charges have been dropped against Mayor Raz Baraka following his arrest outside an ICE facility.

2:06Bondi is the one who installed Lindsay Halligan as the interim U.S. attorney. That has been invalidated. Both Halligan and Bondi should be disbarred. Those are just some of the many cases that the DOJ has tried without success to pursue. Here are some more. Judges have pushed back in each case, saying that the challenges themselves lack legal merit. And with any government shakeup, it seems that breaking up is hard to do. Bondi reportedly did not want to leave her post at DOJ. The New York Times reports that she spent much of yesterday, making her case to stay in the cabinet. Bondi, however, released a statement saying otherwise.

2:52She wrote, quote, that she is thrilled to be moving to the private sector and will continue fighting for President Trump. Trump announced the shakeup in a Truth Social post, writing that Deputy AG Todd Blanche will serve as acting attorney general until a new AG is nominated. Blanche, who was once Trump's personal lawyer, is not without controversy himself. Last year, he conducted a much-discussed interview with Jeffrey Epstein's convicted associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. In the wake of that interview, Maxwell was transferred without explanation to a minimum security prison. Last week, Blanche was at CPAC, where we got a sense of the new acting AG's priorities.

3:38Take a listen. I represented President Trump in the Manhattan DA case and in Jack Smith's prosecutions. Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places? Illegals can't vote. We see our most activist judges that we lose to every single day. There's a lot of ways that we can work within that to get some of our cases where we want them to be. MS Now reports that the president is considering a short list of candidates to replace Bondi, and the list includes EPA head Lee Zeldin, Republican Senator Eric Schmidt, and U.S. Attorney Janine Pirro, who is currently overseeing a controversial case against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

4:26Joining me now to discuss all of this is Molly Jung-Fast, New York Times opinion writer and the host of the Fast Politics podcast. Also with us is Andrew Weissman, former FBI general counsel, former Mueller prosecutor, and an MS Now legal contributor. Andrew, let's start with you. AG Pamela Jo Bondi is now out. What's your reaction? So I think there's a temptation in these kinds of stories to focus on the person who was fired. What did they do right? What did they do wrong? And I think that in this instance, that is going to be going straight for the capillaries. I think she is a symptom of what is going on in the White House and specifically the Oval Office.

5:14this Department of Justice was a plaything to Donald Trump. And moving the deck chairs around, shifting who is in charge, is not going to change the policies and practices that are so antithetical to the rule of law. So while she is out, I think that is really not the story. I think they'll I don't see them putting anyone else in who's going to adhere to the longtime values of the Department of Justice under Republican and Democratic administrations of being independent of the White House about who gets charged and who does not get charged. Molly, what's your take on this? So Andrea has basically said that the whole corpus is rotted.

6:02It doesn't matter who's at the head. What's your take? That's a fundamental indictment of the Department of Justice. From someone who knows what the Department of Justice is supposed to look like. I would say what's meaningful about this is not so much that she's gone, but how she's gone. Remember, Donald Trump made a real point in Trump 2.0 of not firing people. And he would even, Kristi Noem, was moved to a really great fake job, right? The Shields of America. Which sounded like something from the Marvel Universe. Yes. But apparently it's a real thing. Right. A real thing that they clearly made up.

6:34But, you know, so I do think it's important that this really happened. They did not move her. They just fired her. He fired her via tweet. You know, we're already seeing leaking, right? She spent yesterday. How do we know she spent yesterday begging for her job because someone leaked it? So we're already seeing leaking. And remember, one of the reasons why Trump tried not to fire people this time is because when he did last time, all he did was leak. So the fact that he has done this, done this so quickly, did not give her a fake job. Even Mike Walls got another job. So I think that is very meaningful.

7:10Look, I don't know how he gets someone Senate confirmed again. I guess he's going to have to take another senator. But the actual movement and this sort of inability to keep someone, I think that's meaningful. So, Andrew, going back to your bigger point about the rot at the DOJ, one of the reasons the president was apparently so frustrated with Bondi was that she had not done enough, in his view, to secure wins against his perceived enemies. Given that so much of her tenure was spent trying unsuccessfully to prosecute the president's perceived enemies, what's the nature of the legacy that she leaves behind?

7:47And what will her successor have to achieve going forward to live up to this president's expectations? Well, I sort of view that as the president being unwilling to look in the mirror and understand that he had unrealistic expectations, saying that, oh, she's not effective because she wasn't able to reindict and then reindict again Letitia James or to indict six members of Congress for doing the unspeakable, which is speaking the truth and doing so protected by the First Amendment. Those are not failings of the attorney general, other than the attorney general should never have approved them. But another attorney general is not going to do any better.

8:32The problem is the president, not the attorney general. I mean, obviously, the attorney general should not be subservient. They are professional. They should be saying no. But it really, to me, is the president thinking, oh, there is no such thing as a rule of law. And if I can just get somebody more effective, they can sort of trample on the rule of law better than Pam Bondi did. And I think that ignores the fact that you have grand jurors and you have judges in the system and they can push back and have pushed back on illegal practices. That's a great point, Molly. I mean, it wasn't that Pamela Jobandi didn't try to launch these prosecutions.

9:11It's that judges were like, no, that won't fly. Or jurors would say, like, we're not going to issue a bill in that case. The New York Times reports, though, that this particular attorney general was a real loyalist. According to the New York Times, Bondi was, quote, like a radio built to pick up only one channel to Mr. Trump's demands. Ms. Bondi gained and maintained her position through her attentiveness, loyalty and obedience. And that makes her uniquely vulnerable to shifts in the president's opinion. Well. I mean, what to say? Well, this is the Trump 2.0 problem, right? This is a cabinet filled with people who have their jobs because of their fealty to Trump and not much else.

9:55I think it's very hard for women to do MAGA. We've seen this again and again. This is something I think we've talked about. Yeah, because part of MAGA is this rage, is this ability like Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings, this ability to turn a question on a questioner, to sort of be so angry. And American women, our culture has not embraced the angry woman as of yet. And MAGA is this hyper-sexualized Mar-a-Lago face, you know, a certain aesthetic, which really runs contrary to pushing back against a questioner quite that way. Well, let me push on this. It strikes me that the only two people who have yet to be ousted from this cabinet are women.

10:39And there weren't a lot of women to begin with. And there's some rumblings that maybe the third will be Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI, head of DNI. What does that say about this administration's interest in protecting and defending women, letting women have a real seat at the table, as it were? Yeah. Remember in Trump 1.0 where they couldn't they didn't have enough women and they kept bringing in like they have Ivanka. I mean, everyone here is like a non playing character except for Trump. So everybody has been sort of put in there because they're actors and that he even says that, you know, that he was impressed with Pete Hegseth because of the way he was on television.

11:18You know, these people are actors in sort of Trump's, you know, present reality, reality show presidency. it. Andrew, the DOJ has obviously much changed after Bondi's tenure. Is there any hope that this ship will write? What will need to happen, whether it's in the next attorney general's tenure or even beyond that, to make the Department of Justice the entity that we have always known it to be in both Republican and Democrat presidents past? That's a nice small question there. I mean, that is a huge, huge issue. Please answer it in one minute. Yes. So first, don't have any hope for Todd Blanche.

12:01In many ways, this is not just the firing of Pam Bondi, but it's the snubbing of Todd Blanche. I mean, the normal process would have been to elevate him and propose that he will be the next attorney general. And so essentially the sins that we've been talking about that are against her are against him. as well. And so also, I can't imagine a confirmation hearing for him because it would be very much a bloodbath and would put front and center issues like Epstein, which we'll talk about. And so another Justice Department is really going to have a hard time because once you've broken those norms, there are going to be people who really think that that's something you can do.

12:49There's going to be a lot of pressure. As we know, the Democrats are very want to say, let's look forward and not back. I am not in that camp. I think that if there have been crimes, the only way to deal with them is not to say if there are crimes and if they're serious, obviously, is not to say I'm going to look forward and ignore them because the message then is you can get away with it. We would never do that for any serious crime. And so I know that it is complicated, more complicated than this sort of minute can get into. But I do think we have to rethink the sort of Obama generation of let's just look forward and bygones will be bygones because we've seen what happens.

13:33All right. Andrew Weissman, Molly Jungfast, stay right there with me. Rest of you, we will be back in just 90 seconds.

13:46She, from the get-go, royally fouled up the release of the Jeffrey Epstein documents. And it was just such a rolling disaster all year and was handled so poorly that that was one of the biggest problems, despite her obvious loyalty and her background. We are back with the breaking news. Donald Trump firing Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi. According to the New York Times, among the reasons for Bondi's ouster is the president's dissatisfaction with her handling of the Epstein files, which, quote, has become a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. Early in Bondi's tenure, she fanned expectations of bombshell revelations from the files.

14:35Take a listen. The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients? Will that really happen? It's sitting on my desk right now to review. That's been a directive by President Trump. I'm reviewing that. Six days later, Bondi's DOJ staged this flashy stunt, handing MAGA influencers binders that were supposedly filled with new Epstein information. The stunt backfired spectacularly. The binders contained nothing new, angering the very influencers they were meant to impress. The Department of Justice that suddenly says there is no client list. There's no blackmail operation. Epstein definitively killed himself.

15:19You're not getting any more documents. Thank you. Goodbye. No more questions. You know, my reaction is, what are you talking about? They trotted us out right in front of the press pool, which I didn't appreciate. Once we looked at it, we realized we didn't have anything that anybody else didn't already have. Why am I giving more transparency than the FBI and the DOJ are giving? Bondi then went into damage control mode, signing off on a memo disclaiming the existence of an Epstein client list, reversing her previous statement. In the meantime, behind the scenes, Bondi reportedly told Trump that his name appeared in the files.

15:54The confusion and contradictions fueled a MAGA revolt. Eventually, Trump was forced to sign the Epstein Transparency Act, which required the files release. But the DOJ rollout of the files was scattershot and incompetent, failing to redact some survivors' identities while redacting information about those who the FBI once called co-conspirators. Congressman Jamie Raskin said that in the unredacted files, Trump's name appeared more than one million times. When lawmakers pressed Bondi for an explanation, she gave this now infamous response. This administration released over 3 million pages of documents, over 3 million, and Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents.

16:48You know why? Because Donald Trump, The Dow, the Dow right now is over. The Dow is over$50 ,000. I don't know why you're laughing. We're back with Molly Chung Fast and Andrew Weissman. Molly, what is the Dow today? I think it's not$50 ,000. But yeah, look, you see when you watch her how hard it is to do that MAGA masculine. Was it just the style thing or was there something about the Epstein files that was just especially hard for her to get her hands around? Remember, this is someone who campaigned for Florida AG on her record of combating sex trafficking. Yeah. And it's really I mean, I think that when you watch the videos of her running for reelection in 2014, she does a whole video about sex trafficking and how she's really committed to stopping it.

17:41Fast forward, when she testified in front of oversight, there were all of these Epstein survivors in the back row and she wouldn't look at them. So it is such a good example of how there's the Faustian bargain that people make when they go to work for Donald Trump. Andrew, speaking of the Faustian bargain, there's going to be a new AG in town for a while. It may be Todd Blanche who knows who it will be afterwards. words, the Epstein files show no signs of evaporating. Is any attorney general going to do what the president wants, which it seems to be, is to simply make these all go away? So, look, the Epstein files right now, the Department of Justice is in violation of the law.

18:28They were supposed to return over all of it. They are claiming privileges that the law does not allow them to claim. They have released things in, it's true, a completely incompetent way. But that's not the problem. All of this would make some sense if a new attorney general came in and we all said, oh, look, the new attorney general is competent, is now releasing all of the Epstein files, all of the ones that have not been released. But as sure as we're all three of us are sitting here, that's not going to happen. And that's because the issue here is not the Attorney General, just to beat a dead horse here, but the issue is the White House.

19:08It is true Pam Bondi and Todd Blanch were incompetent in the way it was rolled out, but the reason we do not have all of those is not the Attorney General. It is the Oval Office. And I can't believe we're going to see them under this administration. And so lashing out from the White House to the Department of Justice is not going to make the problem go away because the documents will still be under seal. Andrew, before we take the break, you made this really important point, I think, about what the way forward might look like if someone was interested in writing what has happened at DOJ. I want to play some tape.

19:45This is Todd Blanche, who made a quite revealing admission last week when he talked about what people inside the administration are actually afraid of. Take a listen. Everybody's afraid that the next administration, if we don't win, we're going to all be investigated and indicted. Think about that. This is not a third world country. This is America. And the existing administration is afraid that they're going to get indicted. Think about that. This is not a third world country. This is America. Is it off the charts to even think about the prospect of actually prosecuting individuals if they have committed crimes in the service of this president?

20:25Can I just step back for a moment and just say that Todd Blanche is saying that at a time that he sought the indictment of six members of Congress for speaking the truth, he sought the indictment of Letitia James three times. He is greenlit issuing a grand jury subpoena that was quashed by a federal judge to Jerome Powell. You could go on and on. The idea that he is saying that with no sense of irony on his part is remarkable. Now, it is fair to say that an administration has to be incredibly careful in deciding to go after people in a prior administration and not have a sort of endless cycle of tit for tat.

21:11But the answer to that is the law and the facts. And so one of the reasons you didn't see the same thing happening under the Biden administration is because they followed the law and the facts. And the reason you're seeing so much happening now and you're seeing judges, including judges appointed by Donald Trump in the first administration, pushing back is because they are either violating the law or they are not adhering to the facts or, unfortunately, both. All right. Andrew Weissman, Molly Jungfast, thank you for getting us started on this big News Night. Later in the show, I have a special guest who will talk about what it means to have Pamela J.

21:51Bondi fired and how that will impact legal challenges over the president's overreach. Also ahead, I'll get into the quadruple whammy facing Donald Trump in court, from the Supreme Court to his ballroom plans and so much more. But first, we have the brutal reaction from the right to the president's Iran speech last night.

22:19Donald Trump's rhetoric on Iran now confronts a harsh reality. This morning, hours after his primetime address defending his decision to enter into an armed conflict with Iran, the conservative National Review issued this blunt critique, quote, Trump's speech didn't make the case. The New York Times noted that the president's failure to, quote, define a clear path out of the conflict was determinative. And Wall Street also experienced volatility in both oil and stocks after the president bizarrely claimed that the Strait of Hormuz would open, quote, naturally. The Strait will open up naturally, that will resume the flowing and the gas prices will rapidly come back down.

23:09Stock prices will rapidly go back up. Many nations do not appear to share the president's confidence that the strait will open naturally. Today, diplomats from over 40 countries met to discuss a plan to reopen the strait. The AP reports that the United States did not attend. In his speech last night, President Trump also doubled down on threats to attack civilian infrastructure in Iran, a potential war crime. The president said, quote, if there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants and, quote, we're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.

23:53This afternoon, Trump posted a video of a strike on a major bridge near Tehran with the caption, quote, much more to follow. Just to recap, Iran's regime remains in place. Iran continues to have a stock of enriched uranium, and Iran continues to choke off access to the Strait of Hormuz. New polling shows that Americans disapprove of the president's handling of this war by a two-to-one margin. Joining me now to discuss all of this is Paul Rickoff, National security and political analyst, the host of the Independent Americans podcast and the founder and CEO of Independent Veterans of America. Paul, help me understand, how is the Strait of Hormuz going to open naturally?

24:42How does that work? It won't. And it's not working. And I think it's the flashpoint for kind of the world's gas station. And this, I think, is maybe the most important pain point for Trump politically. Obviously, gas prices are now surging toward$5. The entire world is facing a potential energy crisis. And I think it's the epicenter of how much he screwed this whole thing up. I mean, the world can see that he has not only failed to rally the world and failed to put forward clear objectives, he's losing control of the story. I think that's where you see some desperation. Last night was a total debacle.

25:14It was a thud. It was a nothing burger. And it was very unlike Trump because he didn't really make any news. He tried to snatch the microphone and ram his rhetoric and his rationale down the country's throat. But he looked old. He looked tired. He was meandering and unfocused. It was a moment where I felt old and tired at the end of it. I mean, the only good news was it was only about 20 minutes long. Right. So by his standards, it was pretty short. But he didn't make any news on announcing ground troops, which is also some good good news. We could have seen that. Right. But I think folks who were hoping to get inspired, hoping to get moved or hoping to hear it was over, got nothing.

25:45And I would even argue that the networks should reconsider whether they give him airtime and prime time for a speech like that. But he's trying to rip back the narrative. He's trying to control the story. And the war is going sideways. The lid is off now and he can't control it. And even if he did pull out troops tomorrow and he stopped the bombing, which is what I think most of the country wanted to hear, this carnage and the violence wouldn't stop. And that's why he's totally lost control of it. Well, to your point about him losing control of the narrative, 40 plus countries met today to figure out what to do about the Strait of Hormuz, which, as you say, is a major conduit for the flow of oil throughout the world.

26:18So this is now a global energy crisis, not just something that's affecting us, although Americans are definitely feeling the pain of this. What do you make of the fact that our allies and other countries are banding together without us in order to address this problem? I think this is a new normal. I think we have to face a new normal where America is not necessarily causing the shots, calling the shots. I mean, we are. We are causing the shots. We're causing the shots and causing the shock. But we're almost being treated like a rogue nation. I mean, we were becoming more isolated by the day. He didn't attack NATO last night full throatedly like they had previewed, which I think is important because the Italians have closed airspace to American assets.

26:56The Spanish have closed American airspace, closed airspace to American. So we've become more and more isolated. I think now what we're seeing is we can't drive the rest of the world and the rest of the world can move on without us. We're seeing that Israel is going to move forward regardless of what the U.S. does. And now everyone else is suffering. So they're going to put Donald Trump in a little corner and hope that he doesn't act up. The problem is we have 50 ,000 American troops in harm's way. We've still got thousands that he could drop under the ground. There's now reporting that he wants to do an operation to insert special forces and try to secure the Iranian.