Faced with the release of a potentially damning report on his alleged sexual misconduct, Matt Gaetz withdrew his bid to serve as attorney general on Thursday. Within hours, President-elect Donald Trump nominated a second favorite: former Florida prosecutor and longtime loyalist Pam Bondi.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans — Not anymore,” Trump said in a social-media announcement. “Pam will refocus the Doj to its intended purpose of fighting Crime and Making America Safe Again.”
But who exactly is Bondi, and just how deeply is she in Trump’s pocket? Bondi — who, according to the New York Times, had been a Democrat until 2000 — has been onboard the MAGA train from the start, endorsing Trump during the Republican presidential primary in 2016 and quickly establishing herself as a staunch defender of the president-elect on Fox News. She was a prominent speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where she responded “‘Lock her up,’ I love that,” to the crowd’s chants about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Bondi served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019. During her eight-year tenure, she tried to overturn the Affordable Care Act, pushed back against legal protections including marriage for LGBTQ+ people, and declined to take legal action against Trump University after her office received multiple complaints of fraud from former students in 2013. (That same year, she received a $25,000 campaign contribution from Trump, prompting a Massachusetts attorney to accuse her of bribery; the complaint never moved forward.) In case that wasn’t enough MAGA energy, Bondi also worked as one of Trump’s lawyers during his first impeachment trial and backed up the candidate’s nonsense claims of election fraud after Joe Biden’s win in 2020, telling Fox News she believed there could be “fake ballots” at play.
Currently, Bondi serves as the legal chair at the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank that has been instrumental in campaigning for a second Trump presidency and maintains close ties with his transition team. If confirmed, Bondi will oversee a department that is responsible for upholding civil rights and U.S. law, and prosecuting federal crimes — including the cases of hundreds of rioters charged in the January 6 Capitol insurrection, whom Trump promised to pardon. Hell is heating up fast, isn’t it?
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