Chelsea captured the FIFA Club World Cup last weekend and President Trump, who attended the game, managed to obtain one of the gilded Tiffany trophies to display in the Oval Office.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had been invited to the presidential box at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, took home what was, for her, an equally valuable prize: a photograph of Mr. Trump offering her a magnanimous smile and the thumbs-up sign.
The snapshot provided visual proof that Ms. Bondi has, for now, prevailed in her fight with Dan Bongino, a top F.B.I. official who blamed her for bungling the endgame of the investigation into the financier Jeffrey Epstein. Some Trump advisers share that view, but Mr. Bongino badly overplayed his hand and Ms. Bondi parlayed close relationships in the White House into a Truth Social post by Mr. Trump commanding her critics to shut up.
“LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!” he wrote in all caps.
Yet Ms. Bondi’s long-term victory, and perhaps her survival, is anything but assured. Her decision this month to issue a memo affirming that Mr. Epstein’s jailhouse death in 2019 was a suicide precipitated an intense, unexpected right-wing backlash against Mr. Trump with no precedent, no obvious off-ramp and no mercy shown to an attorney general seen by some Trump die-hards as a symbol of second term littered with broken promises.
“I’m going to be here for as long as the president wants me here, and I believe he’s made that crystal clear,” Ms. Bondi told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.
“It’s four years — well, three and a half now, right?” added Ms. Bondi. “We’ve got six months in, and it feels like six years.”
The Epstein saga has exposed the hazards of Ms. Bondi’s focus on courting her mercurial political patron, an inside-game strategy rooted in the assumption, now an open question, that Mr. Trump will maintain the total backing of his political base. Mr. Bongino and his boss, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, have also been fierce Trump defenders.
But unlike Ms. Bondi, they cultivated independent bases of support by positioning themselves as outsiders, even if it meant appealing to the conspiracy theorists now turning on the Justice Department and F.B.I.
Ms. Bondi aroused the suspicion of Mr. Trump’s base from nearly the moment she was selected to replace Matt Gaetz, the former congressman, as the attorney general pick late last year.
At the time, Ms. Bondi was working as a high-paid lobbyist. She soon ran into trouble with her choice to run the Drug Enforcement Administration, a sheriff from the Tampa area; he was forced to withdraw after hard-right activists objected to his arrest of a pastor who had violated pandemic lockdown regulations. Mr. Trump was miffed.
But Ms. Bondi’s original sin — one from which she might never fully recover — was overhyping the “Epstein files” shortly after taking over in February, and refusing to rule out the existence of a list with the names of purported clients of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring.
Ms. Bondi, eager to improve her standing with Mr. Trump’s base, handed out binders marked “Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a conclave of far-right influencers at the White House, in part to prove she was committed to transparency and full disclosure, according to people in her orbit.
The stunt backfired catastrophically. The material turned out to be a dud. The episode has left her vulnerable to attacks from the right, reliant on the president’s protection.
Mr. Bongino, who had promoted Epstein conspiracy theories on his podcast, led the bureau’s effort to scour the Epstein files for new information after Mr. Trump tapped him for its No. 2 job earlier this year. He signed off on the joint Justice Department and F.B.I. memo declining to release more files in the case this month, and expressed no substantive issue with the investigation itself.
But he sharply criticized Ms. Bondi for raising expectations.
Ms. Bondi and her allies, in turn, accused Mr. Bongino, a former Secret Service agent, of planting stories in the conservative news media, blaming her for the backlash and suggesting she resign to quell the crisis.
It escalated into an angry face-to-face confrontation at the White House last week, when an irate Ms. Bondi accused Mr. Bongino of leaking information to the news media in the presence of Mr. Patel and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who is also a close ally of Ms. Bondi’s.
Ms. Wiles implored Mr. Bongino to be a team player, but he responded with a brusque reprise of his grievances, according to two people briefed on the exchange. Ms. Wiles left the meeting annoyed with him.
Mr. Bongino did not show up for work on Friday but returned on Monday.
His status remains up in the air. A bureau spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
But Ms. Bondi, who initially ruled out working with him, has told friends she will abide by whatever decision the White House makes.
At her news conference on Tuesday, she sidestepped questions about her relationship with Mr. Bongino, saying she would not comment on “personnel matters.” But she indicated she had no problem working with Mr. Patel, who has also been privately critical of her, according to people familiar with the situation.
“I was with Director Patel this morning, and we are working on fighting violent crime,” she told reporters at the news conference.
Ms. Bondi has taken actions that appear geared toward ingratiating herself to Mr. Trump’s base, including approving the firing of prosecutors of Capitol rioters and department staff who worked on the Trump criminal cases. On Wednesday, she greenlit the unexplained termination of the veteran federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, the daughter of former F.B.I. Director James B. Comey. Ms. Comey worked on the successful prosecution of the Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Yet none of this has dampened hostility on the far right. Laura Loomer, an influential activist who speaks often to Mr. Trump, has led a high-volume campaign to oust Ms. Bondi. It has yet to sway the White House, but appears to be reverberating among Republicans in Congress who have suggested that she is not quite up to the job.
“She took on this big assignment, this huge job, and she got thrown in the deep end,” said Representative Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee who has joined a small group of hard-liners seeking to force a symbolic vote demanding that the Justice Department release the remaining files on Mr. Epstein’s case. “I mean, I had never really heard of her before she was nominated — and suddenly she is in the spotlight.”
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. But people close to the attorney general said that she was, in fact, experienced in coping with crises — and was drawing so much criticism because she had taken public responsibility for the Epstein case, rather than delegate that task to a subordinate.
Over the past week, Mr. Trump’s mood has darkened. He began with a social media post that good-naturedly pleaded with his supporters to drop their obsession with Mr. Epstein, moved on to minimizing the importance of the case and, by midweek, was posting a diatribe that described Epstein obsessives in his ranks as “weaklings” who are trying to undermine his presidency.
There are no indications that Mr. Trump is turning on Ms. Bondi, and he has told advisers that he values her loyalty and willingness to take slings and arrows on his behalf.
The president has sometimes been forced to jettison close allies when politically necessary. Still, he has shied away from firing loyalists, instead choosing to reassign them to other jobs within the administration — most recently Ed Martin, who was given another Justice Department job after his nomination to be the U.S. attorney in Washington foundered in the Senate.
But Ms. Bondi is no midlevel official. She is the chief law enforcement officer in the country.
And that might, ultimately, be the best guarantor of her job security.
Replacing Mr. Bongino, a political appointee who does not require Senate confirmation, is relatively easy. Nominating and confirming a new attorney general would be a daunting task at a time when congressional Republicans are bracing for a potentially difficult 2026 midterm election, made all the more challenging by the emerging schism over the Epstein files.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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