Donald Trump’s choice to lead the US justice department will be grilled on Wednesday about whether she will follow through on her threats to prosecute the president-elect’s political foes.
Pam Bondi, who served two terms as Florida’s attorney-general before becoming a fierce Trump loyalist, has vowed the “investigators will be investigated” once he returns to office, and has insisted “the bad” prosecutors will be prosecuted.
The claims have sparked concerns among Democrats and legal scholars, and the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee said he would scrutinise those statements when Bondi testifies at her confirmation hearing before his committee.
“The obvious concern with Ms Bondi is whether she will follow the bipartisan tradition . . . and oversee an independent Department of Justice,” said Senator Dick Durbin. “She has echoed [Trump’s] calls for prosecuting his political opponents, and she has a troubling history of unflinching loyalty to the president-elect.”
Bondi’s nomination as US attorney-general has been less scrutinised than other controversial Trump appointees, such as Kash Patel, his choice to lead the FBI, who has vowed to “shut down” its Washington headquarters “on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state’”.
“Kash Patel makes her look like Lady Justice in comparison,” said Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School.
She is also seen on Capitol Hill as more qualified than Trump’s first choice, former congressman Matt Gaetz, who was forced to withdraw amid allegations he used illegal drugs and paid for sex.
Bondi’s tenure as Florida’s attorney-general, a job she won after nearly two decades as a career prosecutor, has also insulated her; during her tenure she became close to more traditional Republican governors such as Rick Scott, now a Florida senator, and Jeb Bush, who she initially endorsed in the 2016 presidential race against Trump.
Born in Tampa, Bondi’s 18 years as a career prosecutor were in the city’s Hillsborough County, where she tried cases ranging from death-penalty murder to domestic violence. Nick Cox, who supervised Bondi there in the 1990s, described her as an “aggressive prosecutor” who “always had very little tolerance for crime”.
Cox, whom Bondi appointed as statewide prosecutor when she was elected Florida attorney-general, said she “will totally be loyal” to Trump, but added: “Pam will never abandon the boundaries or the ethics that she’s learned for over 30 years now”.
As state attorney-general, Bondi, now 59, cracked down on pain clinic “pill mills” that facilitate prescription drug abuse, and backed several state laws aimed at quashing illicit use of opioids, fentanyl and other drugs.
As Florida’s top lawyer, “I had to fight my own party on getting penalties tougher, because it was right when fentanyl was breaking in the market,” Bondi said at an event in 2023.
As US attorney-general, Bondi may sustain the clampdown pursued by President Joe Biden’s administration on illicit fentanyl, which has overtaken legally prescribed painkillers as the main cause of overdoses in the US.
That could also lead to a focus on immigration and the southern border — hot-button issues for Trump — as Mexico remains a main source of fentanyl unlawfully flowing into the US. Bondi has long embraced a tough immigration stance.
Her ethical record has already come under scrutiny. In 2013, days after she received a $25,000 political donation from Trump — then a real estate magnate — Bondi decided not to proceed with a probe into alleged fraud at Trump University, a now defunct, for-profit college that was generating complaints of deceptive business practices. Both Trump and Bondi have long denied any connection. Trump ultimately paid $25mn to settle lawsuits by students and the New York state attorney-general.
Bondi surprised many allies by endorsing Trump after Bush dropped out of the 2016 race. But she soon became one of his closest supporters.
Bondi joined his defence team for his first impeachment trial and defended his efforts to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election, including overseeing voting-related lawsuits in several states. She is among four of Trump’s personal lawyers nominated for top jobs at the justice department.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, she was an outspoken critic of the criminal cases against Trump, insisting there was a “two-tiered system of justice” out to get him.
The “deep state [in the] first term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows, but now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated”, Bondi told Fox News in 2023.
Those promises to go after Trump critics have raised particular concern on Capitol Hill and in legal circles.
“Conveying to Americans that the justice department might become a tool of presidential vindictiveness will inevitably, if continued, diminish the status of the department,” Richman said. “If juries, witnesses, judges and communities start thinking of prosecutors as being just minions of the president, our system won’t function very well”.
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