Donald Trump selected former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as his latest nominee for U.S. Attorney General, following his disastrous pick of disgraced former Congressman Matt Gaetz for the position. Bondi was the state’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019, and has more recently been affiliated with the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a right-wing organization that has spent years drafting hundreds of executive orders for a potential second Trump administration. In a statement announcing Bondi’s nomination, Trump falsely claimed that the Department of Justice “has been weaponized against me and other Republicans,” and that Bondi “will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”
But Bondi’s record as Florida attorney general and subsequent record has shown a clear loyalty to Trump over rule of law and justice, including defending Trump as part of his legal team during his Senate trial in 2020 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, being an early proponent of the Big Lie and outrageous lie that he won Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election, and declining to join legal action against the now-defunct Trump University’s shady practices after receiving a $25,000 check from the Trump Foundation. Bondi has also supported some of Trump’s most deplorable nativist actions, including the Muslim ban and the termination of the DACA program in 2017.
The U.S. Attorney General doesn’t typically play an outsized role in immigration policy, but Trump’s first Attorney General in his first administration, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, reimagined the position, playing a critical role in executing its extreme anti-immigrant agenda. Bondi may or may not play as active a role as Sessions when it comes to immigration issues, but we can be assured she will use the office to bat for every extreme angle of a “bloody” mass deportation agenda. And with the Ken Paxton Empowerment Act set to pass Congress and allow extreme state attorneys general to sue the federal government in pursuit of local anti-immigrant agendas, they are likely to find an eager partner in Bondi.
BONDI AND IMMIGRATION
During her tenure, Bondi joined forces with impeached Ken Paxton, perhaps the most corrupt state attorney general in the nation, to block hundreds of thousands of long-settled families in her state from applying for then-President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which would have allowed them to live without the fear of deportation and more fully contribute to their communities. 2014’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) would have protected the immigrant parents of children who were legal permanent residents or U.S. citizens, while DACA+ would have expanded the 2012 DACA program. The 26 states, led by Texas, filed the lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Texas, clearly hoping to draw the notoriously anti-immigrant Andrew Hanen as a judge so that they could stop the programs from being implemented. This strategy employing what we’ve long called the “anti-immigrant judicial pipeline” ultimately resulted in Hanen issuing an overreaching preliminary injunction that blocked families nationwide from applying.
In Florida alone, more than 250,000 immigrants would have benefitted from the relief blocked by Paxton and Bondi. Additionally, Florida lost some $607.9 million in new tax revenue that would have been generated by these workers if they’d been allowed to apply for DAPA and DACA+.
Bondi has further supported efforts to end DACA entirely, issuing a statement lauding then-President Trump’s cruel decision in September 2017 to terminate the successful and popular policy and throw the lives of more than 20,000 Florida Dreamers into limbo. But as Juan Escalante, former America’s Voice director of digital campaigns, noted in 2016, Bondi kept her immigrant bashing to herself when then-Governor Rick Scott signed into a law a measure that currently provides in-state tuition for the very same Dreamers attacked by Trump in 2017. “That is right,” he wrote at the time. “During Florida’s 2014 Legislative Session, Pam Bondi was out of the frame as Rick Scott promoted legislation that benefits immigrants covered by the DACA program – or as Bondi called it “Obama’s unconstitutional order.’ I should know because I was there when Rick Scott signed the bill into law.” During Bondi’s tenure, Florida was also among 13 states to urge the courts to uphold Trump’s discriminatory Muslim ban. But when the Trump administration carried out the state-sanctioned kidnapping of thousands of children at the southern border, Bondi declined to join a lawsuit demanding the reunification of families. Because parents were separated from their children to be criminally prosecuted by the DOJ, Bondi would be at the center of any potential resurrection of this horrific and barbaric policy.
BONDI AND THE BIG LIE
Bondi was also a vocal proponent of the Big Lie and false claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, “a role often overlooked among the better-known players in the post-election drama,” The Washington Post reported last month. Legal Defense Fund in fact called her “one of the first public figures” to push the Big Lie. Even as votes were still being counted in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Bondi made false claims that Trump had won the state, that there was “evidence of cheating,” and reportedly singled out a state official for harassment by MAGA supporters. Privately, Bondi “discussed legal strategies to challenge the results in a state Joe Biden ultimately won by 80,000 votes,” The Post said. While Bondi could provide zero proof to her unfounded claims, damage was done.
“Pennsylvania officials from both parties say there were consequences to her actions, arguing that Bondi spread misinformation that helped wreak long-lasting damage to the electoral system,” The Post continued. “One city official received antisemitic threats immediately after Bondi accused him of trying to intimidate Republican observers of the ballot count.” In her capacity leading the AFPI Center for Litigation, Bondi has also supported the fiction that national elections are being “compromised” by undocumented immigrants. Republicans spent 2024 ferociously promoting the bigoted lie about noncitizens polluting the ballot box with fraudulent votes in anticipation of possible loss in November. Following Trump’s victory, such claims have, unsurprisingly, dissipated.
Bondi’s promotion of the Big Lie and “willingness to help Trump battle to overturn the 2020 vote,” as The Post described, should make her nomination for U.S. Attorney General a nonstarter. Trump’s own U.S. Attorney General at the time of the 2020 election, Bill Barr, told the Jan. 6 committee that the race “was not stolen by fraud” and that Trump had “become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff.” But Trump doesn’t really need to believe anything he says, he just needs people in place who are willing to say it’s true and then act on it. Bondi has shown she’s shameless enough to fit the role.
BONDI AND TRUMP UNIVERSITY CORRUPTION
Bondi is also inextricably tied to the corruption around Trump’s Trump University scam, a for-profit, unaccredited “school” where enrollees shelled out as much as $35,000 “to learn Trump’s real estate investing ‘secrets’ from his ‘hand-picked’ instructors,” The Guardian reported in 2016. But in reality, “it seemed like the instructors aimed to do little more than bilk money from people who dreamed of successful real estate careers,” including requesting on the first day of a seminar that students raise their credit card limits, the Center for American Progress said in 2017. “This was not an aberration. There was literally a ‘playbook’ spelling out these tactics.”
Despite Bondi’s office receiving at least 22 complaints regarding Trump University and related entities, she declined to join New York’s lawsuit against Trump University for “engaging in persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct.” An illegal donation offers a clue as to why. Reporting revealed that “as Bondi’s office was deciding whether to take legal action related to Trump University,” the Trump Foundation “broke the law by giving an illegal $25,000 contribution to a political group supporting” Bondi’s reelection effort, ethics watchdog CREW said in 2016. “The donation, illegal for a 501(c)(3) private foundation to give, was personally solicited by Bondi from Trump.”
“Charitable foundations like the Trump Foundation are not allowed to engage in politics,” CREW noted. Trump paid a $2,500 fine to the IRS and had to personally reimburse the Trump Foundation for the illegal contribution. The Trump Foundation “was ultimately dissolved after a state judge found Trump had ‘breached his fiduciary duty’ to the charity in other ways, behavior that the AG’s office called a ‘shocking pattern of illegality,’” The Daily Beast reported in 2021. Mired in lawsuits and complaints, Trump University also shut down. In 2016, just weeks before he was sworn in for his first term, Trump agreed to settle with Trump University victims for $25 million.
If confirmed as U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi will be a rubber stamp for further decimation of our democratic values and our history as a nation of immigrants, and would be a win for corrupt corporate interests and the billionaires of Trump’s cabinet over working families. As Legal Defense Fund President and Director–Counsel Janai Nelson said, Bondi is “an alarming pick for Attorney General.”
“Pam Bondi has made clear that her undeviating allegiance to the President–elect supersedes her respect for democratic institutions. She would be a dangerous person to serve as our nation’s top law enforcement officer. And she will be enabled and emboldened by a trio of Trump’s private criminal defense lawyers who he has chosen as nominees to surround her at the Department of Justice. If confirmed, these appointments would compromise the independence and integrity of the Department of Justice and undermine its role as an impartial guardian of the law.”
