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The incoming Trump administration wasted no time Thursday after Matt Gaetz announced he was dropping his bid to become attorney general, announcing former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi will seek the top job at the Justice Department.
Bondi, who served as Florida attorney general from 2011 to 2019, is an experienced public official and longtime Trump ally. Here’s what you need to know:
Ethical questions about campaign cash in Florida
Trump and Bondi have a relationship that dates back more than a decade, when Bondi was Florida’s first female attorney general.
In 2013, when Bondi’s office received complaints from people who claimed they had been defrauded by the president’s Trump University seminar, his political committee received a $25,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. While New York is pursuing a lawsuit related to the seminar, Florida is not. Trump and Bondi denied the donation was relevant or related to the charging decision.
It’s not the only campaign-related scandal in Bondi’s time in Florida.
That same year, he persuaded Governor Rick Scott to reschedule the execution of convicted murderer Marshall Lee Fore to accommodate a fundraiser.
“I didn’t have to ask for the execution to be moved. It has been (delayed) twice,” he said at the time, The Tampa Tribune reported. “I’m sorry. And it will never happen again.”
High case notes
Unlike some of the Trump administration’s other nominees, who lack direct experience in government related to cabinet positions, Bondi has a significant record in public office, and has shown a willingness to take on high-profile cases.
He helped appoint the special prosecutor who investigated the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, by neighborhood watch volunteers.
He also began a lawsuit in 2018 against opioid drug makers, litigation that ultimately ended in a $3bn settlement with the state of Florida after he left office. Bondi’s office also sued BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and helped Florida pay more than $2 billion.
A diehard Trump defender and political ally
Since leaving office, Bondi has been a staunch ally of Trump through the administration, as well as several impeachments and criminal investigations.
He served on Trump’s opioid commission and helped coordinate its response when his administration was in danger.
In 2019, Trump hired him to assist in his first impeachment investigation, over allegations of a quid pro quo agreement to pressure Ukrainian officials to go after the Biden family.
During the investigation on January 6, Bondi appeared on Fox News and dismissed the proceedings as a “show trial,” when it was reported that one of the Trumpworld figures offered a job to one of the key witnesses, Cassidy Hutchinson.
That support includes linking to some of Donald Trump’s most inflammatory claims.
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, Bondi joined a chorus of Republican officials accusing Joe Biden and his son Hunter of corruption.
“The theme of our party tonight is America, the land of opportunity,” Bondi said at the RNC. “But for Joe Biden, it has become the land of opportunism, not opportunity. As a career prosecutor and former attorney general of Florida, I fight corruption and I know what it looks like, what people in pinstripe suits or orange jumpsuits do.”
In November 2020, Bondi was outside the Philadelphia Convention Center with Trump campaign officials as they claimed voter fraud, claiming the Republican had won Pennsylvania before the state announced the election results.
The alliance continued after Trump’s election defeat, with Bondi chairing a Trump-related political action committee, and serving as litigator at the America First Policy Institute, a legal advocacy group affiliated with MAGA that condemned the prosecution of Donald Trump as a “weapon” of the justice system and seek to limit the legal supervision of the current and former president.
The group asserted that the pro-Trump crowd during the January 6 uprising at the US Capitol was unfairly prosecuted as victims of a “two-tier” justice system.
If Bondi is confirmed as attorney general, he will be in charge of the Justice Department’s sprawling Jan. 6 case, the largest prosecution in U.S. history, as well as the department’s response to civil rights cases and allegations of voter fraud.
She will be the third woman to serve as attorney general, and the first in a Republican administration.
