Donald Trump’s advisers may be pushing for the president to axe his Attorney General following reports of rampant dissatisfaction over her handling of high-profile cases at the Justice Department.
“What I can tell you from my reporting is that Pam Bondi is very much on the ropes internally,” Jake Lahut, a White House correspondent with Wired, told MSNBC Saturday. “I did this informal poll in one of my most recent stories for the newsletter, where I asked Trump officials to rank one through five who the cabinet members in the worst standing were.”
“One of these guys put Bondi one through four, really just like, lumped in everyone else at the end,” he went on. “So the knives are definitely starting to come out for her.”
Though Trump himself has publicly expressed support for Bondi in her capacity as the nation’s top prosecutor, the president has also shown increasing signs of frustration over her perceived failure to deliver on a long-promised campaign of retribution against his political enemies.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. What about [James] Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia [James]?? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” Trump posted to Truth Social in September. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Trump’s latest DOJ appointee, Lindsey Halligan, has since moved at breakneck speed to bring indictments against Comey, the former FBI director who ordered the bureau’s probe of Russian interference on behalf of the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, and James, the New York Attorney General who previously sued Trump for civil fraud. These actions come despite widespread outcry at the perceived evidentiary weaknesses of both cases.
Earlier this week, it emerged that Halligan, an insurance lawyer and diehard MAGA loyalist with zero prosecutorial experience, had failed to notify both Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche before filing charges against James in Alexandria, Virginia. The move reportedly blindsided both senior DOJ officials.
Sources have since claimed that Halligan “just wanted to get it done,” but Lahut speculated during his Saturday MSNBC appearance that someone within the MAGA administration may have had an ulterior motive in leaking details of her move to the press.
“I never want to speculate into a competitor’s sourcing, but what it does make you wonder is whoever leaked this, were they okay with the implication that either Pam Bondi isn’t on top of this, or that Halligan might look like she’s jumping rank?” he said. “There’s really no downside to doing that internally.”
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