Pam Bondi Fails to Make Her Case

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0:48Hi, Ruth. Hi, how are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. When you look back on Pam Bondi's tenure as U.S. Attorney General, which just ended, what do you see as the defining moment or image of that time? Oh, so many to choose from. It has to be Dow 50 ,000, which came out of nowhere at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in response to, I think, a question about Jeffrey Epstein. The Dow is over$50 ,000. I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over$50 ,000 right now. The S &P at almost$7 ,000. And the NASDAQ smashing records.

1:41Americans' 401ks and retirement savings are booming. That's what we should be talking about. We should be talking about making... And this was the outburst that spawned a thousand memes. And it really kind of encapsulates Bondi's tenure. So why do you think that her comment about the Dow being at 50 ,000 is so memorable or reflective of kind of who she was as AG? It's so jarring. It's so off point. The role of the attorney general is not to be the cheerleader for the president of the United States. It's to be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. And yes, attorneys general in the past have been political allies of the president, but they have never been cheerleaders to the extent that we saw from Pam Bondi.

2:35Yeah, it's something that like a bad press secretary would say. Now, let's not mince any words. It was really unhinged.

2:44That's Ruth Marcus, who recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker about Donald Trump's dismissal of Attorney General Pam Bondi. Ruth appeared on the podcast this past fall to discuss Bondi's journey from Florida prosecutor to the head of a Department of Justice that has bent to Trump's will at every turn, as well as the role she played in the president's legal investigations into his political enemies. Now that Bondi has been fired in the wake of a series of high-profile missteps, many of which revolved around the Epstein files, and a broader failure to effectively carry out Trump's wishes, I wanted to talk with Ruth about what led to her ouster, what the Department of Justice might look like under new leadership, and whether the damage that Bondi did to the DOJ and the country's legal system can ever be undone.

3:29This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

3:42So I thought we could just start by talking about why exactly Bondi was fired. I mean, I think it's fair to say that she's been beleaguered for quite a while now. But in a Truth Social post, Trump called Bondi a great American patriot and a loyal friend, but he didn't actually give an explicit reason for why she was losing her job. So I guess I'm wondering what, in your opinion, caused this or what was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back and why it's happening now. So Pam Bondi was kind of dead Attorney General walking for quite a while, for several months at least of her 14-month tenure.

4:21And I think the surprising thing about Trump 2.0 has been that unlike the first term when he just fired people willy-nilly left and right on Twitter very quickly and just went through a whole bunch of stuff, The surprising thing is that she and others like Christy Noem lasted as long as they did. I think she was fired in the end for two reasons. One is correct and one is incorrect. The correct one was that she botched the handling of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files from the very start. If there was a runner-up to my vision of Pam Bondi, my lasting memory of her touting the Dow, it was the time she announced in February of 2025 that the Epstein files were on her desk, the Epstein client list was on her desk.

5:18It wasn't that it should have been cleared up right away. It wasn't that was just the beginning of her unbelievably terrible handling of this whole episode from start to finish. So that alone was actually a legitimate reason to fire her. The illegitimate reason to fire her, and one that I think was at least as prominent in Trump's mind, is that as much as she scurried to do the president's bidding in terms of using the criminal justice system to go after his political enemies, As much as she went after James Comey, Letitia James tried to go after others like Jerome Powell, Adam Schiff. I could keep going in a way that has never been done at that scale or at that level of flagrancy at the Justice Department before.

6:17She could not do enough. Grand juries would not let her do enough. Judges would not let her do enough to satisfy Trump's mania to punish his political enemies. So that, I think, is the primary reason that she was fired. And it is the primary reason that whoever her successor is will also end up disappointing Trump because he wants something that has been delivered to some extent by these punitive and unjustified. indictments, but that is not entirely deliverable because there is some resilience in the criminal justice system. Yeah, there's a line in your most recent piece about Bondi being fired that really clarified kind of the situation for me, where you mentioned that, of course, this is happening right around the time that Trump has also fired Kristi Noem, who was the Secretary of Homeland Security.

7:14And so we get these two high-profile firings, kind of like one after the other. But whereas Trump's move to get rid of Noam, you write, sort of reflected a degree of recognition that her mass deportation campaign had gone too far or had at least turned off Trump's supporters. In Bondi's case, Trump was mad that she hadn't gone far enough. Is the idea that she wasn't skilled enough to carry out his wishes or was she just not corrupt enough? Like, is there anyone who could, you know, get a grand jury to go the other way? Like, that seems like it's beyond the purview of the AG. Well, Noam and Bondi, shared a degree of liability with Trump.

7:53For Noam, it was a liability that, you know, resonated with me and made me relieved to some extent, was that, you know, at the behest of Stephen Miller, she and Corey Lewandowski and the ICE leadership just went way too far in their mass deportations. And she became a liability for Trump in that way, with a segment of even his own supporters. Pam Bondi became a liability for Trump with an even more important segment of his own supporters in terms of her handling of the Epstein files. But the thing that's most disturbing about her firing, and, you know, let me say this, I don't really shed a lot of tears for Pam Bondi here, but the thing that's disturbing about her firing is that I think even more of it was because she was not performing to the extent Trump wanted and going after his political enemies.

8:53And I think that the answer to your question is, and we will see if somebody who replaces her, if Todd Blanche, who's the acting attorney general, was her deputy, really handled as the deputy attorney general is supposed to do, the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department during the Bondi tenure if he is any more skilled. But what we have seen over the months of the Trump administration is that grand juries can refuse to approve indictments. That is very unusual, but it has happened to a remarkable degree in a number of different places with a number of different indictments during the Trump administration.

9:37What we have seen is that federal judges will refuse to approve subpoenas if there is no basis for them. And so as extreme and unleashed as the Justice Department is now under Trump's urging, there is a remarkable resilience in the system to resist that, at least that we've seen so far. And I don't want to make it sound like that means everything is perfectly fine because the cost of going through criminal investigation, the cost of responding to it, certainly if you're indicted, the cost of dealing with the indictment is huge, both financially and emotionally. This is not the way our system should be operating.

10:22But at the same time, we should feel a little both relieved and proud that our system has resisted to the extent that it has. Absolutely. Before we get into the details of what has been happening at the DOJ under Bondi, I'm wondering if you could just kind of remind us of exactly why Trump was drawn to her in the first place for attorney general. I mean, you wrote this amazing profile of her back in August that focused on her rise to power and captured the first seven or so months that she had on the job. And I'm wondering if you can just tell us a little bit about what the promise of Pam Bondi was in Trump's mind.

11:00The promise of Pam Bondi. Well, I'm going to do the promise of Pam Bondi in my mind, which I know better, and then I'll switch to Trump's. Let us recall that Pam Bondi was Trump's second choice. The first choice was Matt Gaetz, the disgraced former congressman who was the subject of a very devastating House Ethics Committee investigation into his alleged drug use and penchant for young women. And he, Gates was too much even for this Republican Senate to go along with. So that was made clear pretty quickly after his nomination. And he was replaced very quickly with Pam Bondi, who was an ally of President Trump's from Florida.

11:50They knew each other very well from there. She had been a reasonably well-regarded attorney general of Florida. And though she didn't have any experience in the federal system and that's a deficit for the job, she looked from the outside like so much of a wiser, better, more restrained, more reasonable choice than Matt Gaetz. And at her confirmation hearings, she said mostly the right things about resisting the politicization of the Justice Department, et cetera, et cetera. And then she got confirmed and then she took the job and then she underperformed to a remarkable degree from my point of view in terms of trying to protect the department from the excesses and the excessive demands of Donald Trump.

12:50She was attorney general for an audience of one from the get go, announcing that the department existed to serve the directives of Donald Trump, that anybody who disagreed with that was welcome to leave. She presided over an unbelievable purge of the Justice Department, you know, some of its most experienced and well-respected career prosecutors. I think that's a change that really has ill-served the department and made us much less safe in a time of war because it goes to losing people with a lot of counterintelligence experience. And she just continued to do his bidding and more, you know, getting into these fights, you know, just really inappropriate and unwarranted fights with the rogue, you know, activist judges who were ruling against the department.

13:51having these bizarre interchanges with Congress where she spoke to members of Congress in a way that I don't think any attorney general has ever done before. And that was just wild. Putting up, and maybe this is my third most enduring vision of Pam Bundy, putting up this absolutely creepy banner of Donald Trump hanging from the Justice Department as if it is the Department of Trump and not the Department of Justice. I said in the piece that I wrote, and I believe this, no, there may have been more corrupt attorneys general. There may have been more attorney generals, more heedless of the Constitution, but there is no attorney general who has presided over greater and more long-lasting damage to the Department of Justice than Pam Bondi.

14:45I mean, this is kind of an impossible question, but when you describe all of this, including the banner of Trump that was hung at DOJ, which just reminds me of something you would see in like a college basketball arena or something like that. I guess I just wonder, like, do you see things like the banner as kind of like a sign of increasing desperation on Bondi's part to keep her job and to keep Trump happy with her to some extent? Or do you think that this is just who she is and what her vibe is? You know, I think that we have seen across the Trump administration, and it's probably not unique to the Trump administration, the incredible power of ambition as a driving force in the political narrative and in people's personal behavior.

15:31And the accompanying the ambition is the desire to hold on to the power that you have at seemingly at all costs. And this is, for Pam Bondi, it actually was not evident at the start. She did not come from a particularly political family. Her family were Democrats. She did not evidence particular interest in politics or partisan politics. She did not actually seem politically ambitious. She was a local prosecutor in Hillsborough County, Florida. And then kind of out of the blue, she got a call from a political operative in Florida asking if she was interested in becoming and running for state attorney general.

16:27She didn't really have the usual attributes for being state attorney general. But she did have some experience in television and she did like, she was very good on TV. She had been a very capable communicator. And so this ambition wasn't like evident at the start, but it's like one of those flames that once it started flickering, it just turned into this big conflagration. And then it just seemed like she was desperate, as you suggested, with the hanging of the banner, with the reports that we've gotten about her, what must have been a horrible ride in the Beast, the presidential limousine, where she kind of begged to be able to have a little bit more time in her job, according to the news reports.

17:15But just this desperation to remain in this job that, you know, So she's not the only one. We've just seen, you know, so much of human nature and the human condition in this administration. Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, I want to talk more about what the Department of Justice looks like in the wake of Bondi's ouster. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

17:47politics is confusing governing is messy but talking to each other about all this stuff it should be easier and that's where we come in i'm david green the host of left right and center where we gather each week to talk about what's happening in politics from every angle listen to left right and center from kcrw every friday wherever you get your podcasts

18:23So, Ruth, earlier you were talking about Trump's revenge tour, which was obviously a very big part of his campaign, just sort of going around saying that he was going to prosecute all of his enemies. And then we've seen quite a bit of that actually happening during the Trump administration. And a lot of that was sort of authorized, if not overseen, by Pam Bondi herself. I mean, you also said that a lot of these cases have been stymied because of grand juries, you know, deciding not to indict and that Bondi hasn't been able to go far enough. But I guess I'm just wondering if we could go back to this idea of the revenge tour and if you could kind of walk us through like the more notable developments on that front and if any of them have yielded victories for Trump.

19:06Do Bondi and Trump have any successes on the revenge tour front or has it all just been kind of a disaster? Well, OK, so this is interesting. Let's take through it. Um, the revenge tour has been successful in the sense that, um, first of all, they've managed to hollow out the Justice Department either by firing people or by making it so not just unpleasant a place to work, but unacceptable a place to work. that you've rousted people from the place who would uphold its traditions of professionalism, ethics, and responsible prosecuting. So that is a very big change and a very big success, as it were.

19:57I mean, just a tragic success of the revenge tour. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, was at CPAC, the conservative conference, the other weekend before Bondi's ouster, talking with pride about how no one remains in the department who had had anything to do with the Trump prosecutions. So this is a measure of what he thinks is victory and what I think is tragic. I'll just keep using that word. The revenge tour has also succeeded in, I think, muting the involvement of law firms in standing up to the Justice Department. Obviously, the Justice Department has tried and so far not succeeded, though it's persisting, in going after individual law firms for alleged actions that don't sit with the president's approval.

20:56And he's trying to punish them. Four of the law firms are fighting back, Nine of them, shamefully, capitulated. But I talk to lawyers all day long in my job, and very few of them are allowed to speak on the record by their law firms, in part because the law firms, understandably so, I don't just, you know, I can't really argue with them, do not want to have the wrath of Trump directed at them. So the revenge tour succeeds in that way. In terms of individual prosecutions, partly because the department has so overstepped, partly because they have bungled the naming of U.S. attorneys so that some of their people have been deemed to be not qualified to sit in the U.S.

21:45attorney position. So the indictments that have been issued under their directions have been voided. So if you kind of go through the list of individuals who Trump has demanded be prosecuted, we have seen the Comey indictment tossed, one of the thinnest indictments I've ever seen. We have seen the indictment of Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud be tossed. The Comey indictment was for alleged false statements. That was ridiculous. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, her indictment was for alleged mortgage fraud. That was ridiculous. Adam Schiff has not yet been indicted. Some of the people who Trump would like to indict, for better or worse, received pardons from President Biden, who did some preemptive pardons on his way out the door.

22:38Reasonable people can differ about whether that's a good idea, but that has frustrated Trump. He has tried to get the Justice Department to go after Biden for the use of the auto pen, I think, in an effort to get those pardons deemed null and void so that he can then prosecute these people. That has also turned out to be a difficult lift for him. But we have he has a continuing set of investigations, this big investigation in the Southern District of Florida that goes to this humongous alleged conspiracy against him during the first term. And before that, that is continuing and that is costing people a lot of legal fees and misusing the criminal justice system.

23:28So I would say that's kind of my how's the revenge tour going tour of the whole thing. No, that's extremely helpful. So given all of these people who have been fired, I mean, you mentioned Blanche saying that all the people who were involved with the Trump prosecutions are no longer working for the DOJ. I guess I'm wondering about hiring and kind of the lowering of hiring standards that Bondi has overseen during her time at DOJ. So this is a really, really, really important question. I'm so glad that you asked it. The department is sort of operating in a little bit of a home alone situation. There's so many vacancies.

24:08They've had to dragoon military lawyers to fill in in some of the U.S. attorney's offices where there are vacancies. Chad Mizell, who was Bondi's first chief of staff, took to Twitter to solicit applications for the Justice Department from those who, he said, supported Donald Trump's agenda. By the way, this is not a normal job qualification for working at the Department of Justice. The normal job qualification for working at the Department of Justice is you have really good grades. You've gone to a good law school. You have a commitment to public service and to the Constitution, not to Donald Trump.

24:51And for generations, lawyers have gone to the Justice Department. It's a very attractive job. Usually you need experience to get in there. They have lowered their standards so that you don't need to have had prior, apparently, experience practicing law in order to become a federal prosecutor. And so what they've done is lowered their standards and made it such that the kind of people who would ordinarily join the Justice Department, which is really the cream of the legal crop, are dissuaded from coming. But this doesn't just have implications for the Justice Department in the here and now. And those implications are serious.

25:35I mean, the Justice Department prosecutes important elements of federal crime. And 94 U.S. attorney's offices across the country, if they are doing a lousy job of doing that, we are all less well off and less safe. We do not want bozos in these jobs. We certainly don't want zealot bozos in these jobs. And we don't want them in these jobs for years and years and years. But what I'm very afraid is going to happen is that smart young lawyers are not going to be willing to come to the Justice Department even after Donald Trump leaves office, even if there is a Democratic president in power, because they're going to understand these jobs as tenuous, not, you know, lifetime careers, but a place where you can only last for a few years and then the new guy or woman someday might come in and boot you out the door because you don't, you haven't complied with their ideological standards.

26:36This has never happened before to this extent in a Justice Department, and it's very dangerous, not just as a short-term thing, but for the long-term health of the department. Well, that's incredibly depressing. All right. Just to get into even more depressing stuff, I'm hoping we can talk a little bit about Epstein just because that is something that has totally overshadowed, you know, Pam Bondi's entire tenure at DOJ and has kind of defined it in many ways. And we talked a little bit about how her handling of the case has been bad for Trump politically. But I'm wondering if you can talk about how the focus on Epstein has caused a lot of chaos within DOJ.

27:21Like, you know, you were mentioning earlier the things that DOJ normally does in terms of the cases that they focus on and how many people need to be on a particular case. And I guess I'm just wondering, like, is there just like a huge portion of DOJ that is focused right now on like redacting files and dealing with Epstein? And then there are just all of these cases that would normally, you know, be pursued that aren't being pursued. Like, how has like bodies mismanagement of this scandal caused problems within the DOJ itself. So the degree to which one man has and his death, you know, the ripple effects of this is just extraordinary.

28:02I am not sure about the degree to which the Epstein redaction effort is continuing or not. But the Southern District of New York, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office, which is really the premier U.S. attorney's office in the country, the hardest one to get a job in, the one that takes on some of the most sophisticated and important cases, whether they're, you know, corporate fraud or counterintelligence or high level drug trafficking, has a big chunk of that office was detailed. to speed redacting these Epstein files. This cannot be a very sensible use of government resources. Now, we have that one that they were detailed to do that is what we can't actually lay at the Justice Department's feet.

28:59They had to do that in response to a statute that said, hey, we need to see all of these things. If this Justice Department, if previous Justice Departments had been more attentive to some of the things in the Epstein files previously and had gone through some of that effort, maybe we'd be better off. Look, there are a lot of prosecutors who think, and for good reason, that this exercise of laying all of these personal emails and all of these personal details out there is incredibly damaging. Obviously, it's been damaging in the most important way, which is that some of the identifying information about some of the victims has been made public, and that's just terrible and sloppy and inexcusable.

29:50But I think we probably haven't had, and some people who are listening to this are going to disagree with me, and I understand that, but we haven't had enough of a serious conversation about whether the details of people's private lives, the kind of things that prosecutors see all the time, but don't put out in public because they don't rise to the level of criminal action. And so they're not relevant to be disclosed. We now are just going through all sorts of sorted, and I have to say I read them all, but very personal things that ordinarily would not be made public. If Epstein had been taken more seriously longer ago, we probably wouldn't be going through this exercise now.

30:41And this is a phenomenon that I think goes far beyond any failings of Bondi or the Trump administration. Do you think at the end of the day, it is the Epstein stuff that probably took Bondi down? Like if for some reason Trump's base had been satisfied by, you know, the initial tranche of files and that wasn't something that was such a big conversation and the revenge tour proceeded exactly as it has proceeded in fits and starts, do you think that she would probably still have her job today? No, I think that Trump is a toddler. Trump wants what he wants. He can only be denied what he wants for so long.