The spectacular rise and sudden fall of Pam Bondi

Pam Bondi ranks among the country’s worst attorneys general, but it appears she was fired for not being bad enough. President Donald Trump’s displeasure didn’t owe just to her embarrassing bungling of the Epstein files. By many reports, he was livid over her lack of success in prosecuting his enemies. The list is long: Former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, and six members of Congress who reminded US troops of their duty to disobey illegal orders. Judges and grand juries trashed Bondi’s attempted persecutions. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called her out at a hearing in April.

“You’ve turned the people’s Department of Justice into Trump’s instrument of revenge,” he said. She disgraced, demoralized and depopulated the DOJ as if she meant to destroy it.

She “brought our nation’s rule of law to its knees,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. Career attorneys walked out over the political scheme to drop corruption charges against New York City’s former Mayor Eric Adams, so he would be a Trump ally on deportations.

Bondi purged others because they had prosecuted Trump’s insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, had been assigned to the several other investigations of him, or because their loyalty to him was in doubt. She demoted an executive for failing to remove portraits from the Biden years. DOJ lawyers should owe loyalty to nothing but the Constitution. Bondi owed loyalty to no one but Trump — for whom it wasn’t enough.

Bondi cut off the American Bar Association’s access to judicial nominees for the first time in 72 years, depriving the Senate of an independent opinion on their qualifications. She leaves behind a proposed rule to prohibit state Bar groups from opening investigations of DOJ lawyers like herself, despite a federal law that specifically subjects them to state jurisdiction of ethical standards.

That is where Bondi finds herself — exposed to disbarment in Florida, where she holds her only law licence, for systematically violating the Code of Professional Responsibility that supposedly governs all Florida lawyers. If she isn’t disbarred, it’s hard to imagine who should be. The Bar rejected a well-founded complaint against her last year on the premise that it doesn’t go after lawyers while they occupy federal constitutional office. Soon, she’ll be out.

Nothing in its published rules stated such an exception, but in December, its Board of Governors asked the Florida Supreme Court to approve one. The new rule is pending. It’s an insult to the public interest. The court should reject it.

However, that’s moot now for Bondi. Trump went out of his way Thursday to say she would return to the private sector. Jon May, the Boca Raton lawyer who filed the first complaint against her, said Thursday he will file another with the Bar, “significantly revised” to include a wealth of new examples of professional misconduct. The Bar’s closure letter last June acknowledged he could refile “once the above-named lawyer no longer serves in such a position.”

May’s original complaint to the Bar was co-signed by Lawyers Defending American Democracy, Democracy Defenders Fund, and Lawyers for the Rule of Law, along with 70 prominent legal ethics professors, former judges and lawyers. They included former Florida Supreme Court chief justices Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quincy and a former president of the American Bar Association, Martha Barnett. Their complaint cited lawyers who quit the DOJ or were fired by Bondi for refusing unethical orders.

Bondi’s interim replacement, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, is one of the president’s former personal attorneys, as Bondi herself was during his first-term impeachments. That’s not encouraging. Blanche helped Bondi purge the DOJ of lawyers who worked on cases against Trump. “There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” Blanche boasted to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Among the lessons the Senate should learn from Bondi’s 14 misspent months at the DOJ: No president’s personal lawyer should ever be attorney general. Another is that whoever’s chosen should disclaim under oath loyalty to anyone or anything other than the Constitution. Trump is reported to be leaning toward EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who has been energetically renouncing every critical environmental protection he can lay hands on, including the EPA’s authority to regulate climate-altering greenhouse gases. He voted as a member of Trump’s so-called God Squad to waive environmental regulations affecting oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. As attorney general, Zeldin could do even more harm. It’s ironic that Bondi was only Trump’s second choice for A.G. His first, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, was too toxic to be confirmed. He could hardly have done worse.

Tribune News Service