The Senate confirmed Pam Bondi as attorney general on Tuesday evening, a swift ascension to become the nation’s top law enforcement official at a time when President Trump has already begun to reshape the Justice Department he has bitterly denounced.
Ms. Bondi, 59, spent years as a prosecutor in Florida, eventually rising to become its attorney general. More recently, she has been a high-profile surrogate for Mr. Trump, casting doubt on the results of the 2020 election, criticizing prosecutors in other jurisdictions who charged him with crimes and defending him at his first impeachment, over whether he had improperly withheld military aid to Ukraine.
She takes the reins at the Justice Department as the president has tossed vague accusations of criminal wrongdoing against his political rivals, and out-of-power Democrats warn that the attorney general may enable abuses of power.
The Justice Department has already begun making sweeping personnel changes in the career ranks — reassigning or dismissing scores of prosecutors, including those involved in the investigations into Mr. Trump.
Hours before the vote, F.B.I. officials turned over a lengthy list of information about agents who had worked on Jan. 6, 2021, riot investigations — a list that has provoked fears that it could be used to punish or fire hundreds of agents. Some agents filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to stop the Justice Department from publicizing the names of the agents.
On the Senate floor, Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, said Mr. Trump’s promised “campaign of retribution is happening.”
“Top F.B.I. agents have been fired,” he continued. “Would she have defended these F.B.I. agents at the risk of her own job, as one senior F.B.I. leader has done? Of course not, and let us not pretend otherwise.”
The country “cannot afford,” Mr. Schiff said, an attorney general who believes their role is to defend Mr. Trump rather than the American people.
Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, called Ms. Bondi “supremely qualified for this job,” and the right person to take over “a Justice Department gone astray.”
In his first term, Mr. Trump had troubled relationships with his two attorneys general — both of whom he forced out of their jobs after they displeased him by not meeting his demands of the Justice Department.
At Ms. Bondi’s confirmation hearing, Republicans urged her to drastically overhaul the department and punish any employees who exhibited what they said was bias against conservatives. Democrats, in turn, questioned whether she would bow to Mr. Trump’s stated desire to seek vengeance.
Ms. Bondi refused to say explicitly how she would handle such pressure from Mr. Trump, but insisted that “politics will not play a part” in her investigative or prosecutorial decisions.
She criticized how the department had been run during the Biden administration, saying the department “has been weaponized for years and years and years, and it has to stop.”
She also refused to back down from her past vow in a television interview that “the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones.” Pressed about that statement, Ms. Bondi replied that “none of us are above the law.”
In 2010, Ms. Bondi emerged from a crowded Republican primary to win the Florida attorney general’s race. Over her eight years in the job, Ms. Bondi became a national figure in the battle against opioid addiction. Since her nomination, she has focused on that part of her résumé and her prosecutions of violent criminals as her chief credentials for the job.
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