Attorney General Pam Bondi has been fired by Donald Trump. She leaves a corrupt legacy. (Photo: U.S. Justice Dept.)
Pam Bondi was involved in enough scandal during her year as Attorney General to sink almost any career, but in the upsidedown Donald Trump administration, she was not corrupt enough.
The 60-year-old former top U.S lawyer, who showed almost unyielding fealty to the president, was fired in the most brutal and humiliating way.
After Trump left her twisting slowly in the wind for days, amid swirling Washington rumors about her imminent demise, he dismissed her in a social media post. Their personal meeting did not go any better,
He reportedly told her she was out on the short drive from the White House to the Supreme Court on Wednesday (Apr. 1) to hear arguments in Trump’s birthright citizenship challenge.
“I think it’s time,” Trump told her, according to The Wall Street Journal.
She begged to stay, sources told the paper, at least through the summer. But the decision was final.
In a final act of fealty, she never let on she had been sacked. She sat next to the president in the gallery as if nothing had happened. But after giving so much to the president, she had to feel used… a piece of garbage.
A day later, Trump formally dismissed her with a saccharine statement on his Truth Social site. He called her a “great American Patriot and a loyal friend.”
Their relationship was more than that; It was born in corruption.
In 2013, during her tenure as Forida Attorney General, Bondi was inundated with at least 22 fraud complaints regarding Trump University, a for-profit education scam that offered to teach students the tricks of Trump’s real estate business for hefty fees.
At the time, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was suing Trump for tax fraud. Bondi’s office announced that it was considering joining the suit.
Four days later, the Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to Bondi’s political action committee. A short time later, she pulled out of the suit.
After an investigation, the IRS ruled the donation violated laws against nonprofit political contributions. Trump was forced to pay a fine and reimburse the foundation. Bondi dodged criminal charges.
In 2019, New York State close the foundation and fined it $2 million for misusing funds, including the illegal donation to Bondi.
After a close brush with scandal and criminal charges, Bondi’s next logical move would have been to distance herself from Trump. But the scandal did just the opposite — it cemented their relationship.
In 2020, Bondi was named to Trump’s defense team for his second Senate impeachment trial. She was used as a legal attack dog.
She made ultimately false allegations that then Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter were involved in corruption in Ukraine and backed Trump’s false claim of large-scale voter fraud in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
After taking office last year, Trump nominated her to be U.S. Attorney General on the rebound. His first choice Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz withdrew amid a scandal involving sex with an underage girl.
Trump had a clear agenda for the hallowed office and it was nothing like the duties outlined in the “Ethics in Government Act of 1978.” The post-Watergate measure established the office as a representative of the United States, not the executive branch.
But Trump treated it as his personal law firm, and Bondi was only too happy to carry out his wishes.
Less than a month into her term, she became embroiled in a “quid pro quo” scandal involving New York Mayor Eric Adams that raised serious questions about her judgment and adherence to the law.
Hagan Scotten, an assistant US attorney in the Southern District and lead prosecutor in the Adams case, wrote a scathing email, announcing his resignation.
“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion, but it’s never going to be me,” he announced.
Scotten has prosecuted a number of high-profile federal fraud cases leading to convictions of a former Rudy Giuliani associate as well as Adams’ mentee “Bling Bishop” Lamor Whitehead, according to The New York Post.
The matter was a serious breach of her ethics and integrity and raised serious questions whether she had the temperment or judgment to continue in office. But she and Trump brushed off the scandal.
Trump also expected Bondi to aggressively bring cases against his personal and political foes like New York Attorney General Letitia James, California Sen. Adam Schiff and former FBI Director James Comey, among others.
In February, a Washington D.C. federal grand jury refused to indict Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), and four other House Democrats on accusations of sedition.
“Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) in a scathing rebuke.
Trump grew frustrated when no charges were forthcoming, yet failed to understand that Bondi faced legal and judicial restraints — chief among them a lack of credible evidence of wrongdoing — that thwarted her efforts.
And, then, there is Epstein, Epstein… Epstein.
Trump hemmed himself in on the scandal by promising during the 2024 election campaign to fully release all Epstein files in the possession of the government, which turned out to be copious, an estimated 6 million potentially responsive files.
Bondi was tasked with managing the release with the utmost goal of protecting Trump.
But her handling of the files was marked by a cycle of public promises followed by a series of high-profile “blunders” that ultimately contributed to her being fired, according to media reports.
Congress put her under the gun when it passed the “Epstein Files Transparency Act” (H.R. 4405) last year. The law compeled the Justice Department to release all unclassified records related to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Files were finally released weeks past the statutory deadline that contained serious, credible allegations that the president abused underage girls, despite repeated reports that the department redacted Trump’s name from thousands of documents.
Bondi not only missed the deadline but the files have been nothing short of a mess; survivor’s names were released and the names of people who may have committed crimes were hidden.
The files revealed that people close to Trump – including the US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick; former strategist Steve Bannon and Elon Musk – all had closer relationships with Epstein than was previously known. None of the men has been charged with wrongdoing in connection to Epstein.
Of the estimated 3.5 million documents, videos and images released that have been released to date, Trump’s name appears more than anyone else, outside of Epstein himself, a reported 38,000 times.
The department now claims it has fully complied with the law, even though it reportedly is still sitting on an estimated three million files, leading critics to charge a broad coverup.
In February, she appeared before Congress to testify on Epstein and ICE, and turned what are normally staid hearings into a fiasco.
She largely avoided addressing the questions about the department’s handling of the files and repeatedly, personally attacked House members.
Beyond Epstein, Trump praised Bondi for her “crime fighting” efforts, only to be upstaged by reports that her office had dropped 23,000 pending criminal investigations in the first six months of 2025.
The cases involved white-collar crime, nursing home scams, crypto frauds, drug offenses, and terrorism. Instead, Bondi shifted resources to pursue an estimated 32,000 immigration prosecutions, according to ProPublica, which broke the story.
With Bondi’s departure, the department has been left in turmoil. As of Jan. 2026, more than 2,500 lawyers retired or quit the department, and 261 were fired or transferred out of a staff of 10,000 lawyers, according to Reuters.
One-third of the departures were career leaders, according to Bloomberg Law.
Significantly, an estimated 70% of attorneys in the Civil Rights Division left or were pushed out and the department’s Public Integrity Section (PIN) was cut to only two lawyers.
Only a fraction of the open jobs have been filled, according to the American Bar Association. Hiring has been snarled by a lack of qualified candidates, bureaucratic delays and hiring freezes.
For the time being, Bondi’s deputy Todd Blanche, a dogged Trump loyalist, has been named acting Attorney General. Trump is reportedly considering as a permanment replacement Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin.
He’s unlikely to lift the department out of its ethical and corrupt morass.
Zeldin prominently defended Trump during his first impeachment hearings concerning the Trump–Ukraine scandal.
Zeldin called for the criminal prosecution of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe and a special counsel investigation into the FBI and justice department handling of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
He’s also called for further investigation into the FBI’s decision to conclude its investigation into the Hillary Clinton email controversy.