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Trump fires Pam Bondi as attorney general
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, will be the acting attorney general, the president said Thursday.
President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday, removing the nation’s top law enforcement officer as his frustration with her job performance deepened.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, will be the acting attorney general, the president said Thursday.
Bondi becomes the second Cabinet member in recent weeks to lose her job, after Trump ousted Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, last month. She was replaced by Markwayne Mullin.
The dismissal of Bondi, 60, ends a turbulent 14-month tenure as attorney general in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so.
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In the process, Bondi surrendered much of the department’s historic independence and oversaw the exodus of experienced career officials, leaving the department’s public corruption and national security units, along with many local U.S. attorneys’ offices, weakened and demoralized.
Yet Trump remained annoyed by Bondi’s inability to secure indictments of people he referred to as “scum” during a speech in the department’s Great Hall about a year ago.
The president’s support for Bondi has steadily eroded since last summer, when her early stumbles in managing the release of the Epstein files created a political liability for Trump among a segment of his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and TV surrogate — a role he thought would suit her talents.
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Bondi spent much of the last day making her case to stay in the Cabinet, according to two people familiar with the situation. But her team could sense those chances slipping away when Trump issued only a lukewarm statement when The New York Times requested comment on rumors she was about to be removed.
“Attorney General Pam Bondi is a wonderful person and she is doing a good job,” he said.
In recent weeks, Trump sent mixed signals, privately praising her loyalty in public, and he has spoken with her several times a week, sometimes to seek advice or test ideas, a person close to Bondi said.
On Wednesday, even as Trump was discussing with aides whether to fire Bondi, the president traveled with her to the Supreme Court to watch arguments in the case challenging his executive order limiting birthright citizenship. Bondi was also at the White House on Wednesday evening for Trump’s address to the nation on the war in Iran.
But he has also expressed continuing dissatisfaction with her performance, and increasingly engaged with her critics inside his circle of advisers.
Sentiment had also been turning against Bondi among congressional Republicans.
In mid-March, five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee blindsided their own leadership — and Bondi — by joining Democrats to vote to subpoena her to testify under oath behind closed doors about the Epstein case.
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The committee’s Republican chair, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, scheduled a deposition for April 14. Bondi has said she would comply with the law, but she and Comer have been quietly working together to avoid the deposition, even though it is unclear if it is legally possible to withdraw a subpoena, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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