Pam Bondi was playing to an audience of one as she tore into Democrats in bitterly partisan DOJ ‘weaponization’ hearing
The cameras were on Pam Bondi as she spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, and she gave the performance of a lifetime — or at least one to make the boss happy.
For his verbal abuse aimed at Democrats like Adam Schiff and Dick Durbin, it was a clear indication that the U.S. Attorney General was just a bystander he seemed to care about.
For many, Tuesday’s hearing was a surreal and horrifying look at how the federal government’s political appointees under a second Trump presidency are consumed with style over substance and often appear disinterested or uninformed about various aspects of their jobs. This image was born by Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, who has been releasing misleading and false information over the past nine months following the shooting of Charlie Kirk when asked about it during a senate hearing.
For Bondi, however, the focus has been on scoring political points by attacking Democrats at every opportunity, especially those who remain one of her boss’s most hated enemies in Washington. He was mildly successful, telling Adam Schiff, “If you worked for me, you’d be fired,” but he seemed to blush at other moments when his lack of experience or knowledge of the job was exposed.
“What about the fires in California?” Bondi asked at one point when her boss directed an awkward jab at the Senator from California, who ran an objection in his first term and called a “failed lawyer” as he hurled increasingly desperate insults.
The attorney general accused senators on the committee of “hating” the president and refused to answer direct questions from several members at the DOJ about his actions. Instead, he played the role of a Comms staffer who wanted to know if Schiff would “apologize” to Donald Trump after accurately noting that Bondi had engaged in childish behavior throughout the hearing—including balancing nearly constant interruptions and personal insults from senators.
Pam Bondi was prepared to appear with Democrats on Tuesday, but was less prepared to answer their simple questions (Getty Images)
This was Bondi’s day to prove her worth as a member of Donald Trump’s ever-changing inner circle, where she has been a fixture for months—even traveling with the president to events such as the US Open and the FIFA Club World Cup. For a while, the Epstein files investigation appeared to be in question thanks to botched use and positioning of an unhelpful declaration that files from the case were “on his desk”—but the DOJ’s handling of the issue and FBI Director Patel largely cooled the dust.
The Justice Department sits squarely at the center of Washington’s attention as the agency becomes a political tool under Donald Trump’s second presidency. In recent weeks, a U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia resigned in what was alleged to be a flimsy and politically motivated case against New York’s Democratic state AG, and was later replaced by an inexperienced White House aide who filed a case against another of Trump’s foes, former FBI director James Comy.
In her role as Attorney General, Bondi plays a unique role in the second Trump administration. News reports indicate that he and his second-in-command, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, are trying to bridge the gap between the president’s aims to use criminal law as a weapon against his enemies.
Pam Bondi and her top aide, Todd Blanche, are Donald Trump’s top loyalists at the DOJ, where prosecuting the president after January 6 became his excuse to lead a Campaign of Revenge (Reuters).
Unlike his predecessors in the first Trump administration, he is taking the most basic steps to make excuses for the agency’s new political bent, thanks to political cover.
Because of the likes of Schiff and others, it was clear that Bondi was now supporting her bona fides with Trump as her only concern was about him taking over the Democrats. Comey remains the only target on Trump’s enemies list, having actually been charged with a crime by a prosecutor with the Justice Department, and the President has publicly pressured Bondi to take further action against others.
Time will tell whether he manages to do this. The president spent the day meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who had released a statement praising Bondi on the real Social — but had yet to watch the clips on TV. Overall, even with the president’s proven ability to fight his enemies, he remains in a tight spot: after all, he’s responsible for seeing some of Donald Trump’s outlandish revenge fantasies come to life.
