President Trump has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, removing the nation’s top law enforcement officer after privately venting his frustrations for months over her handling of the Epstein files and her failed efforts to prosecute his political enemies.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump said he was replacing Ms. Bondi with Todd Blanche, her deputy, on an interim basis.
“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Ms. Bondi is the second cabinet member in recent weeks to lose her job, after Mr. Trump ousted Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, last month.
The firing of Ms. 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.
In the process, Ms. 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 Mr. Trump remained annoyed by Ms. 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 Ms. Bondi has steadily eroded since last summer, when her early stumbles in managing the release of the Epstein files created a political liability for Mr. Trump among a segment of his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and TV surrogate.
Whoever replaces Ms. Bondi on a permanent basis will face the difficult task of satisfying Mr. Trump’s appetite for retribution. Ms. Bondi tried to fulfil Mr. Trump’s demands — launching investigations and trying to indict some of his political opponents, purging agents and lawyers who worked on cases involving the president and installing inexperienced loyalists in top prosecutorial positions around the country. But even still, Ms. Bondi came up short, largely because judges and juries rejected the department’s efforts.
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At a high-profile hearing on Capitol Hill in February, where lawmakers grilled Ms. Bondi on the Epstein investigation, she refused to apologize to survivors of Mr. Epstein, offered few detailed answers and no admissions of fault. Mr. Trump said privately that he liked how she jousted with Democrats, but it was seen overall as a damaging performance.
Ms. 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 Mr. Trump issued only a lukewarm statement when The New York Times requested comment on reporting that she was about to be removed.
“Attorney General Pam Bondi is a wonderful person, and she is doing a good job,” he said on Wednesday, a day before he announced that she was fired.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump sent mixed signals. He praised 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 Ms. Bondi said.
On Wednesday, even as Mr. Trump was discussing with aides whether to fire Ms. Bondi, the president travelled with her to the Supreme Court to watch arguments in the case challenging his executive order limiting birthright citizenship. Ms. Bondi was also at the White House on Wednesday evening for Mr. Trump’s address to the nation about the war in Iran.
But he also expressed continuing dissatisfaction with her performance and increasingly engaged with her critics inside his circle of advisers.
Sentiment had also been turning against Ms. Bondi among congressional Republicans.
In mid-March, five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee blindsided their own leadership — and Ms. Bondi — by joining Democrats to vote to subpoena her to testify under oath behind closed doors about the Epstein case.
The committee’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, scheduled a deposition for April 14. Ms. Bondi has said she would comply with the law, but she and Mr. Comer had 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. A spokeswoman for Mr. Comer said he would discuss next steps with the Justice Department and committee members before deciding how to proceed.
Ms. Bondi, in a statement on social media, said she would be supporting Mr. Blanche’s transition over the next month and then moving into a private-sector role.
“Leading President Trump’s historic and highly successful efforts to make America safer and more secure has been the honor of a lifetime, and easily the most consequential first year of the Department of Justice in American history,” she wrote.
In Mr. Blanche, the president is elevating his former personal lawyer who represented Mr. Trump in multiple criminal cases before he was re-elected president, including at the trial over a scheme to conceal a hush-money payment to a porn star.
Mr. Blanche, 51, brings a mixed record to the job, having spent the past year or so enabling the wholesale politicization of the Justice Department and losing the trust of many federal judges while still serving as a last-ditch bulwark against the president’s most extreme attempts to seek vengeance against his enemies.
He has overseen the destruction of the department’s traditional norms of independence from the White House, often treating Mr. Trump not as a chief executive who could benefit from his legal advice but rather as a loudmouthed client whose orders must followed.
At the same time, he has on occasion shown himself to be loyal to his roots as a former federal prosecutor trained in the Southern District of New York and has held off some of the president’s most impulsive efforts to open criminal cases unsupported by the evidence.
New York Times
