What Happened to Pam Bondi?

By the time she faced her first oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pam Bondi had become a person she never really wanted to be. She had told a reporter once that in college she’d wanted to be a pediatrician, but she ended up becoming a lawyer. She’d said that she wasn’t sure she wanted to actually practice law, but she became a prosecutor. She’d told reporters that she “never dreamed” of running for political office, but she did that too, twice winning campaigns for Florida attorney general. She’d said that when Donald Trump eventually asked her to be U.S. attorney general, she “made it really clear” that she did not want the job. During his first term, she had confided to a friend that she wanted to be ambassador to Italy.

But here she was in a Senate hearing room in October, a person who had once seemed so mild, so warm, so kindhearted that she’d earned the nickname “Pambi,” opening up a folder full of slap-downs, each tailored to a Democratic committee member, with notes on how to deliver them.

“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she told Senator Dick Durbin, who’d asked about the rationale for sending federal troops to his state.

“I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service,” she said to Senator Richard Blumenthal, referring to a matter for which he had apologized 15 years earlier, while dodging his question about why the Justice Department had dropped an antitrust case after lobbying by Bondi’s former firm.

“You took money, I believe, did you, from Reid Hoffman, one of Epstein’s closest confidants,” she said to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who’d asked whether the FBI was investigating suspicious financial activities related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and who later said that Bondi had “made up nonsense.”

“If you worked for me, you would have been fired,” Bondi told Senator Adam Schiff.

And on it went for hours, a calculated performance that amounted to a giant middle finger to basic notions of decorum and accountability, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered, including a fundamental one that some of Bondi’s old friends and colleagues back home in Florida had been asking. As one of them put it to me: “I keep asking myself, What the fuck happened to Pam? ”

At this point, there is little mystery about who Pam Bondi has become. She is an attorney general who does not tell Trump no. During the first year of her tenure, Bondi has carried out the most stunning transformation of the Justice Department in modern American history, turning an autonomous agency charged with upholding the U.S. Constitution into one where the rule of law is secondary to the wishes of the president.

What this has meant so far includes firing more than 230 career attorneys and other employees and accepting the resignations of at least 6,000 more, gutting the Civil Rights Division and units that investigate public corruption, and challenging core American principles such as birthright citizenship and due process. It has meant turning the might of the department against Trump’s political enemies, a growing list that includes former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Senator Schiff, a man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent, an Office Depot clerk who refused to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk vigil, and reportedly Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and the partner of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by a federal immigration officer on January 7. It has meant providing a legal justification for the extra­judicial killings of at least 123 people suspected of smuggling drugs, and for the operation to capture the Venezuelan president, an action that opens the door to a world in which the only law is power. And it has meant becoming the face of the Epstein-files scandal, a position that could ultimately be Bondi’s undoing.

Trump’s previous attorneys general were loyalists who pursued a vision of robust executive-branch authority, but they had red lines: Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, citing ethics concerns; Bill Barr refused to say that the 2020 election had been stolen. Bondi’s willingness to do what Trump wants appears to be boundless, and yet that still might not be enough for him. Trump has reportedly been complaining in recent weeks that Bondi has not been moving as fast as he’d like in pursuing cases against his political opponents.

His frustration extends to her handling of the Epstein files, a political disaster for him that could mean legal jeopardy for her. Bondi has so far failed to comply with a federal law that required the release of all the unclassified Epstein files by December 19—millions of investigative documents known to contain not only references to Trump but potentially compromising information about some of the most powerful men in the world. After promising “maximum transparency,” Bondi has released only 12,285 out of more than 2 million documents—a delay she has blamed on the volume of the files—leading even some of Trump’s supporters to abandon him and leaving Bondi under enormous pressure. Arguably, nothing less than the future of the MAGA movement and the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution depend on what the attorney general is willing to do next.

All of which raises a question: not so much what happened to Pam Bondi, but why.

Any answer would have to come from sources other than Bondi herself. A Justice Department spokesperson rejected my requests to interview Bondi. Even as the attorney general has gone on Fox News and posted selfies with MAGA-friendly media personalities, she has not given any extended interviews with mainstream news outlets since she arrived at the Justice Department, where one of her first acts was to move from the traditional corner office of the attorney general to a far larger conference room. The space is some 100 feet long, with floor-to-ceiling windows, ornate wood paneling, and murals called The Triumph of Justice and The Defeat of Justice, the latter depicting Lady Justice as a blond woman collapsed on the ground. At this point, Bondi, who is 60, has sequestered herself within the MAGA-verse.

I went looking for the person who existed before all of that, which meant going to Tampa, where Pamela Jo Bondi grew up in a middle-class suburb between Busch Gardens and I-75, now a landscape of smoke shops, chiropractors, and strip malls moldering in the sun. Temple Terrace, a golf-course development of ranch houses and mossy oaks, was not the best or the worst neighbor­hood in Tampa. Bondi came from blank-slate America.

by Stephanie McCrummen , The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Denise Nestor. Sources: Tom Williams/Getty; Anna Moneymaker/Getty
[ed. Absolutely awful. A discredit to her profession, our country and our Constitution. History won't be kind.]