Pam Bondi’s loyalty to Trump wasn’t enough to keep her job. Here’s why

For more than a year, Pam Bondi violated the norms of independence expected from a U.S. attorney general and forced Department of Justice attorneys to do the bidding of President Donald Trump.

Yet Bondi’s loyalty to Trump and her willingness to turn the DoJ into a weapon of retribution against his political enemies weren’t enough to satisfy the president. 

Trump dumped Bondi on Thursday and appointed his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, as acting attorney general. 

During her time as AG, Bondi pushed hundreds of veteran lawyers out of the DoJ, pursued the indictments of people Trump wanted prosecuted, dropped cases against the president’s allies and, according to many on both the right and left of the political spectrum, mishandled the Epstein files. 

Peter Shane, a professor at the New York University School of Law, says Bondi converted the DoJ from a politically neutral instrument of law enforcement into an organization dedicated overwhelmingly to serving Trump’s personal agenda. 

“This is not what lawyers signed up for. They signed up for the faithful execution of the law, not faithful sycophancy to the incumbent president,” Shane told CBC News. 

“It is just immensely disheartening to see the de-professionalization of the department and the willingness to flout what I would consider the norms of democracy and the rule of law,” Shane said. 

Failed bids to prosecute Trump’s targets

While presidents have long given their AGs general direction about broad priorities for law enforcement, guardrails designed to stop the occupant of the Oval Office from influencing any specific prosecutions have been in place since the Watergate scandal.

Yet Trump openly told Bondi to launch cases against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James despite flimsy evidence either had committed a crime. Both cases were dismissed last fall.  

Daniel Urman, a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, says while Bondi politicized the DoJ to a degree never seen before, Trump was ultimately displeased by her failure to bring successful prosecutions of his targets. 

“President Trump cares a lot about loyalty, but he also cares about perceived competence or the ability to get things done,” Urman told Reuters.

“It was looking like his Department of Justice wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do.”

You would never know Trump’s disappointment in Bondi by reading his social media post announcing her departure on Thursday. 

Trump praised Bondi for overseeing what he called “a massive crackdown in Crime” and gave her credit for the U.S. having its lowest murder rate in more than a century last year, although there’s no real evidence the administration’s policies were a driving factor.

Instead, there’s evidence that Bondi’s time as the nation’s top prosecutor saw a decrease in the pursuit of serious crimes. 

During the first six months of her tenure, the DoJ dropped more than 23,000 criminal cases, including terrorism, white-collar crime and drug offences, as it shifted resources to immigration, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

Bondi pushed 3,400 lawyers out of DoJ

Peter Carr, communications director for Justice Connection, a nonprofit organization that aims to support the DoJ’s career workforce, says Bondi flipped on its head the notion that the department’s work was driven by fairness, impartiality and the law.  

“On her very first day in office, she sent a memo to all of the DoJ attorneys saying their client was the president of the United States, Donald Trump,” Carr told CBC News.

“Before that memo, the Justice Department attorneys, they saw their client as the United States and defending the Constitution,” he said.

Bondi has since pushed out more than 3,400 lawyers, roughly one-quarter of the staff in place when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, said Carr.  

“Pam Bondi took a sledgehammer to the Justice Department,” he said. “That was a lot of damage done in one year and it could take decades to rebuild what we’ve lost.” 

Ankush Khardori, a former federal prosecutor in the DoJ, described Bondi as “the most openly political and partisan attorney general in modern American history” in a column for Politico.  

Epstein files furor

Trump had soured on Bondi for a while before the firing, describing her to allies in the White House this winter as a “weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda,” according to a Wall Street Journal report in January. 

In February, Bondi vigorously fought back at a House judiciary committee hearing as both Republican and Democrat lawmakers challenged her over her handling of the long-delayed public release of DoJ investigative files into the activities of Jeffrey Epstein, the well connected financier who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on a raft of sex-trafficking charges.

Shortly after beginning her post as attorney general, Bondi suggested she had a list of Epstein’s clients on her desk and made a show of releasing binders of documents, only to face criticism that they contained nothing new of substance.

Then, last July, Bondi claimed there was no client list and announced no further material would be released. That sparked a furor that did not die down until a bipartisan bill in Congress forced the Justice Department to make full disclosure, despite Trump’s repeated opposition.

Even the release was botched. Thousands of documents were taken down from the internet after it was revealed they contained names and in some cases nude photos of some of the young women and girls who’s survived Epstein’s sex-trafficking and abuse.