Why Pam Bondi Is the Attorney General of Trump’s Dreams

18:10Clare Malone:And then after all of this teasing, they came out and said, okay, turns out nothing to see here. We're not going to have any more for you. Go away. That was in early July as I was starting this profile when things really exploded. And so then they had to go through the ridiculous enterprise of purporting to try to unseal grand jury transcripts, parens, they failed, and of interviewing Jelaine Maxwell.

18:40Ruth Marcus:Do you think she just didn't understand the sort of feverish, almost religiosity that certain parts of the base view the conspiracy theories around Epstein with? Or was it just that she did understand it, but she didn't quite know how to satisfy those perhaps unsatisfiable desires? I mean, how do you interpret that? Was she ignorant or was she just sort of a bad strategist on it?

19:04Clare Malone:Well, it could be a hybrid answer. I talked to a senior administration official and said to this official, it seems like Bondi has really screwed up the handling of this. I know it was going to be a problem from the get go, but it seems like what she did made it worse. And this official said, well, a lot of us in the administration didn't realize the zeal with which the base was thinking about this. I'm sorry. Come on. I did. And I'm not as familiar with their base as these folks are. And so, yes, in retrospect, if she had to do over again, perhaps she would have taken it more seriously. I think that, you know, there's a tendency among everybody who's dealing with a problem to try to solve the problem in the immediate term and not to kind of look around the corner and recognize that you could be causing problems for yourself in the longer term.

19:59Clare Malone:And so I guess my assessment goes with the hybrid package. Failure to understand the significance of it, though, you know, you have Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, and they were fomenting this whole thing. They could have mentioned to you that this was a problem. A failure to appreciate, but also, I think, a really fundamental failure to understand how to manage a problem.

20:24Ruth Marcus:Why do you think that Epstein has such a hold on the MAGA imagination?

20:28Clare Malone:I am just the last person who's capable of answering that question because it is so, it's unfathomable to me. But I do think there is, you know, a human tendency that is not limited to one particular partisan point of view to see conspiracies where none exist, to believe in organized cabals where the more likely explanation for things is incompetence and stupidity, as we've been talking about. And then there is this, I think, pretty magacentric conviction about elites, about entitled elites, about the evil of entitled elites. And let's be clear, Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. He perpetrated monstrous crimes on young girls.

21:26Clare Malone:And he had help in doing that from others. And he received outrageously lenient treatment in his initial interactions with the criminal justice system, thanks to, you know, Republican U.S. attorneys who kind of gave him an easy pass. So I think that the Epstein thing just took hold and then was fanned because it was useful for them. The flames of that paranoia and conspiracy theorizing were just fanned by the likes of Bongino and the other conservative influencers to the point where just people lost sense of what was likely true. Yeah.

22:13Ruth Marcus:Well, the fallout after that sort of White House binders incident was pretty brutal for Bondi. This July, at Turning Point USA's annual conference in Tampa, her own hometown, you had speaker after speaker who were calling for her ouster. Conservative influencers and even Republican members of Congress were piling on. Mike Johnson demanded more disclosures. Megyn Kelly predicted that Bondi's days are numbered. Obviously, Bondi is still in office nearly two months later. Did this actually weaken her inside the administration or is Trump's support all that really matters for the moment?

22:47Clare Malone:Trump's support is all that really matters. And, you know, we know Trump's support is like a railway ticket. It's good when it's issued, but it doesn't necessarily last past that day. But, you know, look at Bondi v. Loomer, right? Pam Bondi versus Laura Loomer. Laura Loomer has proven herself, she's a conservative influencer. She has proven herself to be incredibly adept at identifying. Taking out hits. Yeah, she's like the hit person of this administration. And she comes into Trump with a little list. Well, Laura Loomer has been going after who she calls Pam Blondie for months. But her influence with Trump on this has shown its limits.

23:34Clare Malone:Trump is really quite fond of Bondi and believes that she is doing what he wants her to be doing. And so if there's others in the administration who are frustrated with what they see, I think they recognize that she has really one client and it's not the United States. Right.

23:59Ruth Marcus:You've just written about another development, the Justice Department's interviews with Gillian Maxwell. From the outside, that might sound like an effort to get clarity on Epstein, but you argue it's actually worse than expected. Why?

24:12Clare Malone:Well, clarity. I'm not sure it's an effort to get clarity on Epstein. I think it was two things. And let me put this in perspective. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States, the number two person at the Department of Justice, his day job is running the entire 115 ,000 person operation that is the Department of Justice and its component parts. He does not interview individual witnesses in non-cases, okay? By the way, this attorney, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, what was his previous day job? His previous day job was, among other things, being Donald Trump's criminal defense lawyer.

24:55Clare Malone:He did a very good job of it and obviously got rewarded by Trump. He goes down to Florida and he interviews Ghislaine Maxwell with her lawyer for two days. hundreds of pages of transcript, nine hours, I think, of audio recording. And what is the point of this? Well, they say they wanted to, you know, get to the bottom of this, and then they released it because they wanted transparency. I would posit different motivations. One of the motivations is they needed to do something, anything to take the heat off of the Epstein story. So they raced to court with this failed attempt to unseal the grand jury transcripts.

25:41Clare Malone:And when Maxwell's lawyer said, hey, you know, I mean, she might be willing to talk to you. And by the way, there are some things that we might like. That seemed like another opportunity to maybe look like they were doing something. This was in the days after, by the way, they had said, we're not doing anything more here. Right. So so one part of the effort was to show they were doing something. The other part of the effort was to see if maybe just maybe there might be some titillating morsels in there about Democrats. If you listen, if you go through this transcript, they go back to Bill Clinton.

26:21Clare Malone:Bill Clinton, did you know Bill Clinton? Did Epstein know Bill Clinton? Was Bill Clinton on Epstein's plane? Was Bill Clinton on Epstein's island? Did you ever see Bill Clinton get a massage? Did this person who worked for Bill Clinton fly on the plane? They're just trolling for dirt. And at the same time, they are using Maxwell, who, by the way, is a convicted child sex trafficker and was credibly accused by the Justice Department, though these parts of the case were eventually dropped when she was convicted on the more serious charges. She was accused of perjury. They're using her to warrant and testify that Donald Trump, well, he kind of knew Epstein, but I never saw Donald Trump, President Trump, do anything inappropriate with any woman at any time.

27:10Clare Malone:He was always a perfect gentleman as far as I was concerned. So this was a kind of symphony of mutual utilization on both sides. Ghislaine Maxwell and her lawyers were using the Justice Department to try to hope for some special treatment. By the way, that was quickly forthcoming. She got moved to a much more cushy, if that's a fair word to use about a prison, still a prison, but a much more cushy environment. And she's hoping for more. and the administration may not have gotten its money's worth from Maxwell, but they did get, you know, the seal of approval, such as it is, about Trump's behavior.

27:54Ruth Marcus:Yeah. Ruth, I mean, you know, Maxwell is, I think people have said she has some dubious motivations herself. You know, the White House has some motivations here. How is this not a bigger scandal?

28:06Clare Malone:I would say this in a kind of unexpected and somewhat mild defense of the Justice Department. While its behavior here is bizarre, as I said, this is not the normal role of a deputy attorney general. It's not as improper as so many of the other things that the Justice Department is doing. This is not the Justice Department confirming that there's a criminal investigation into a person. Justice departments don't do that. There are rules against that. So if they're kind of looking for information, it's at least it's less offensive to norms than defying courts or firing people because of what they have done, you know, cases that they've brought in the past or other reasons or of going after political enemies.

29:02Clare Malone:So I guess in my hierarchy. Yeah.

29:05Ruth Marcus:In the words of George W. Bush, that's some weird shit. Right?

29:08Clare Malone:In my hierarchy of horrors, this is weird, as you say, but it's not the one that keeps me up at night.

29:19Ruth Marcus:What keeps you up at night?

29:21Clare Malone:Misusing the criminal justice system, ignoring the rule of law. I could keep going. I don't sleep that well.

29:29Ruth Marcus:Well, you spoke to some DOJ officials going all the way back to the Reagan era. Some of them are sympathetic to Trump. And some of them said they were troubled to appalled by Bondi's, quote, ferociously sycophantic rhetoric and purges of career staff. Is Bondi sort of sui generis in doing all this? Or is there any precedent that paved the way for her actions? I guess we could talk about John Mitchell, who was Richard Nixon's attorney general.

29:57Clare Malone:But I would say that there has never been an attorney general, certainly since Watergate, but I would argue in the entire 155-year history of the Justice Department, who has, for better or worse, and I obviously think it's worse, transformed the place so remarkably, both in terms of what it does, how it operates, how the career staff operates, the way it talks to and about judges, The way it deals with court orders, you know, it claims that it's not violating them, but it is, let's just say, ultra aggressive in its willingness to test the limits. No other Department of Justice has changed this much this fast.

30:47Ruth Marcus:Yeah. You had some interesting anecdotes in the piece about just even little almost like office dramas of, you know, I think you open with the failure to switch portraits. Can you maybe just give us a sense briefly of that kind of small office politics detail?

31:03Clare Malone:So it's Pam Bondi's first week on the job. She goes to this rather obscure corner of the Justice Department on the seventh floor, two floors and a full length city block away from her office. And she goes into this secure compartmented facility that houses the top brass of the National Security Division. And when she walks in there, she sees on the wall portraits that enrage her. These are portraits of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland. And they're still on the wall, and it's early February. So somebody told me the other day that she actually climbed up on the couch to get them. I missed that detail for the story, but I'm just going to take it to be true for these purposes.

31:54Clare Malone:However she gets the portraits, she takes them off the wall herself. She walks down the hall and she says, what is this? and somebody says, well, you know, the facility staff around here is pretty slow in getting to these things. And she says, do you not realize that there's a new president? Do you people not know? And what I write is that another attorney general who kind of lost her cool that way might have been a little embarrassed by this reaction. She bragged about it to Laura Trump on Fox TV. And the reason that she did it was she really sees some of the, quote unquote, deep staters at the Justice Department as the, quote, worst of the worst and people who were really dug in against this administration and want to make sure that they fail.

32:48Clare Malone:By the way, the person who she held responsible for the portraits still being up there was somebody who had worked in the White House Counsel's office in the first Trump administration, who was a career lawyer, quite conservative, was on tap to be the top deputy to the political folks in this national security division, but he lost his promotion because of these portraits. And that is just petty and illustrative.

33:20Ruth Marcus:In a minute, we'll look at how all of this is coming together, from investigations to staff purges and what Bondi's Justice Department means for the future. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

33:46Ruth Marcus:Okay, I want to turn to what the Justice Department is doing right now. The investigations that Bondi is launching, the staff that she's firing, and what it all tells us about the future. One senior DOJ official told you that Bondi has presided over a culture of fear, firing career staff for everything from using pronouns and an email signature to authorizing pro bono counsel for Jack Smith, the special counsel who led federal investigations of Trump after the 2020 election. What does this hollowing out mean practically for the DOJ's ability to function?

34:19Clare Malone:Well, it's a great question because to a certain extent, the Justice Department is shooting itself in the foot. When you have a bevy of executive orders that individuals and organizations have filed suit to challenge, when you're engaging in all sorts of other conduct that is generating lawsuits from firing people willy-nilly or for cause or whatever, you need lawyers to go into court to defend you. The part of the Justice Department that defends these kinds of cases is kind of an empty hulk of its former self. Many, many of these lawyers who last from administration to administration and their job is to defend what the executive branch is doing.

35:03Clare Malone:They just don't have the bodies to do it. Some parts of the department are hollowed out and they don't seem to care. For example, about 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division has gone. So you have a department that is transformed, that's hollowed out, that is less capable of doing the work that it's supposed to be doing and where people are as demoralized and scared out of their wits as I've ever seen them. And I hate to say this, it's a little embarrassing, but I've covered Justice Departments for 40 years going back to the days when Ed Neese was Ronald Reagan's attorney general.

35:45Ruth Marcus:Not embarrassing at all. A little embarrassing. No, no. Ruth, what is the practical impact of all this chaos for the mandate of the Justice Department, which is fighting crime?

35:56Clare Malone:Ah, well, I think it's important for people to understand that there are 94 U.S. attorney's offices across the country. their bread and butter is in fact fighting crime. They do fraud cases. They do drug trafficking cases. They do child sex trafficking cases. They do corporate fraud cases. They do drug cartel cases. And that work goes on for the most part as usual, though it's pretty disruptive, I have to say, when you have situations where career people, not just in the Southern District of New York, but in Florida, in Tennessee, where the Comar Abrego Garcia case was brought, where you have career criminal U.S.

36:42Clare Malone:attorneys resigning in a seeming protest or getting fired because of cases that they brought. So the Justice Department is still doing its job of fighting crime, but you are not, certainly in Maine Justice, there is this kind of culture of fear that has been created. And look, I guess there's a school of management that believes that terrorizing your staff gets good work out of them. I have never found that to be true, either as a manager or as an employee. And when you have a staff that's traumatized, you're not going to get your best work out of them.

37:22Ruth Marcus:To go back to that kind of astonishing statistic you were saying about something like 70 percent of the civil rights division leaving, is part of this a sort of Doge-like push for smaller government. Is that an end goal here?

37:34Clare Malone:I don't think this is only about efficiency, though a number, I think it's something like 4 ,000 Justice Department employees have left and they took a buyout that was obviously Doge adjacent or Doge related. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think this is about Pam Bondi and her team's belief that, and she said this straight out, that there are people here who hate us, who don't want us to be here. They are not with our program, and we are going to root them out. We're going to get rid of the worst of the worst. So this is, I think this is an ideological drive that is kind of dressed up at times in efficiency rhetoric.

38:23Ruth Marcus:If you could sort of simplify what, you know, the Bondi or the Trump Department sees as its maybe top two priorities or, you know, top two functions of its role now, what would it be?

38:35Clare Malone:They might say something like drug cartels and violent crime. I would say expanding executive power beyond anything we've previously seen and asserting a vision of Article 2, which is the part of the Constitution that defines the authority and role of the executive branch. expanding Article 2 to a size that is completely inconsistent with the constitutional scheme that we've lived under for 250 years.

39:06Ruth Marcus:Yeah. Maybe looking forward, what kind of Justice Department might a Democratic attorney general inherit after this administration leaves office?

39:17Clare Malone:Traumatized. Mm-hmm. Emptied. Transformed. full of people, I presume, who are not going to be particularly happy with the program of the new administration. And this creates this challenge that I have not really worked out in my head about what the next, at this point, imaginary Democratic attorney general should do to kind of right size, not right size, but put the Justice Department on a more sustainable and normal and correct footing. Merrick Garland, when he came in, thought he had this enormous challenge to fix problems that he saw with the Justice Department and what had happened during the first Trump administration.

40:08Clare Malone:The challenge for the next Democratic attorney general, whoever he or she might be is just so much greater because if somebody has gone in and broken the department, do you then just have to kind of re-break those bones in order to get them to set properly? Or what is the correct way to handle it? And I have to say, the answer to that question is really beyond me.

40:37Ruth Marcus:Ruth, thank you so much for being here.

40:39Clare Malone:My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

40:44Ruth Marcus:This has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker. I'm Claire Malone. This episode was produced by John LeMay with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of Global Audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday.

41:12Thank you.