Pam Bondi (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty)
Well, there’s no forthcoming report on Trump’s latest Attorney General pick suggesting she paid 17-year-olds for sexual contact. In the year of our lord 2025, that actually qualifies as an improvement! But that doesn’t mean that Pam Bondi is teed up to be an amazing AG.
In fact, attorneys are raising some pretty serious alarm bells about a potential AG Bondi. Bondi is the former Florida Attorney General and worked as Trump’s personal attorney before getting the nod to take over the Department of Justice. As former S.D.N.Y. judge and current counsel at Boies Schiller Flexner Shira Scheindlin noted to Law.com, it’s concerning Trump is consistently elevating *his* attorneys to government roles (in addition to Bondi, he’s also nominating his former personal attorneys Todd Blanche and John Sauer to top DOJ leadership positions). “I’m worried about their [DOJ leadership’s] independence from the president, because the attorney general is supposed to be independent, not the president’s personal lawyer. They’re supposed to be representing the people of the United States in writ large. And I am worried that, given it’s Bondi and Blanche and Sauer, all of them have been his personal lawyers,” said Scheindlin.
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Danya Perry of litigation boutique Perry Law contrasted Bondi’s fealty to Trump’s personal agenda relative to her predecessors, “There’s a lot of reason to believe that [Trump] vetted her specifically because there is so much alignment and will not exercise the kind of independence that he really has very aggressively criticized in the past from Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr.”
Georgetown University Law Center professor Erica Hashimoto echoed those concerns saying it is “much less likely that there will be that same kind of separation and independence” between Bondi and Trump. And we can expect Bondi’s history as a lobbyist to impact her prosecutorial agenda too.
“[Bondi] has been working for the past five years as a lobbyist and for essentially big companies, and so she is used to arguing that those companies should not be prosecuted or fined or anything else. I think that will affect how she prioritizes things for the Department of Justice,” said Hashimoto, adding the DOJ priorities will likely be “much more about individual criminal prosecutions, as opposed to the more corporate/business types of investigations and prosecutions.”
We’re getting a pretty clear image of what Bondi’s reign as AG might look like, and it isn’t great.
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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].