President Trump had many good reasons to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi. He picked the single bad one.
When the president announced Ms. Bondi’s departure from his Cabinet today, he offered the customary false praise and cold comfort that accompany such defenestrations. But the core of Mr. Trump’s dissatisfaction with the attorney general was apparently her failure to serve his need for revenge against his enemies. She did not prosecute enough of Mr. Trump’s adversaries, and the cases she did bring were failures.
In a Sept. 20, 2025, message to Ms. Bondi that President Trump posted on Truth Social, he complained that “nothing is being done” about his demand for prosecutions of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote. In apparent response, Ms. Bondi’s Justice Department did later bring transparently defective cases against Mr. Comey (for lying to Congress) and Ms. James (for mortgage fraud). Both prosecutions were promptly and properly dismissed, but the Justice Department is appealing.
These cases were among Ms. Bondi’s worst abuses of the legal system since her appointment, and judges have checked her. But her Justice Department has more such abusive investigations in the works. There is, for example, a federal grand jury probe underway in Florida that is apparently aimed at the Obama-era officials who began the investigation of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Mr. Trump and his allies have also demanded a prosecution of Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought indictments against President Trump in 2023.
The fact that Ms. Bondi has failed in these abusive prosecutorial efforts is cause for relief, not dismissal. It’s the rest of her record that has turned the Justice Department into an oxymoron that will take years, if not decades, to fix.
Ms. Bondi herself has been a terrible spokesperson and symbol of the department — disrespectful of its honorable traditions, dismissive of critics, intolerant of dissent — and this was demonstrated most clearly with her inept handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter. After Ms. Bondi misled the country about her initial disclosures in the case, Congress responded by passing a law forcing the Justice Department to release its files on the pedophile and his allies. Ms. Bondi’s delayed, inconsistent and generally incompetent response to the law achieved the seemingly impossible goal of uniting congressional Democrats and Republicans — in disgust with her performance. (Evidently, Mr. Trump was unimpressed as well.)
Still, the deeper problems with Ms. Bondi’s leadership rested at the level of policy. Under Ms. Bondi, the Justice Department had all but stopped doing its job of prosecuting crime. Case loads are way down, and so are the numbers of prosecutors — almost certainly a result of Ms. Bondi’s leadership. The main reason for these changes is that instead of charging actual criminals, Ms. Bondi’s Justice Department has remade itself as the legal auxiliary of President Trump’s disastrous immigration enforcement practices.
The worst consequence of the Justice Department’s pursuit of cases involving otherwise law-abiding but undocumented individuals is that it has led to untold suffering among those targeted, their families and the economies they support. Ms. Bondi’s lawyers have spent considerable time and money on the harassment, and worse, of people who have done no harm to anyone.
In part because of its fixation on immigration, the Justice Department has cut back on the prosecution of white-collar crime, including through a complete cessation of enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Local prosecutors can pick up the slack when the Justice Department doesn’t prosecute violent crime, but only the federal government has the resources and expertise to bring these cases. White-collar criminals are now getting a free pass, which is how Ms. Bondi, and the president, wants it.
Under Ms. Bondi, too, right-wing culture warriors wield the power of the federal government. The department’s storied Civil Rights Division is now headed by Harmeet Dhillon, who has essentially ended its efforts to defend the rights of Black citizens and instead assigned her lawyers to combat “woke” policies and harass the beleaguered trans community. In an administration headed and staffed by 2020 election deniers, the department has launched investigations in Georgia and Arizona that seem aimed above all at putting future election results, including those of this year’s midterms, in doubt.
Perhaps worst of all, Justice Department lawyers under Ms. Bondi have often behaved in shockingly unethical ways. For decades, federal judges have looked at assistant U.S. attorneys and other Justice Department lawyers as something more than mere combatants. For good reason, judges assumed that federal lawyers told them the truth about the facts and the law of their cases. In legal terms, the actions of the Justice Department received a “presumption of regularity,” which the private bar did not enjoy. But based on the frequently appalling conduct — for instance, lying, gaslighting, hiding facts and evidence — of Justice Department lawyers in the Bondi era, many judges are no longer giving government lawyers the benefit of the doubt. Nor should they.
Replacing Ms. Bondi with her deputy, Todd Blanche, or the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, to name two likely successors, will not solve this problem unless the new attorney general makes the commitment, unlikely under the circumstances, that the Justice Department will return to its tradition of honesty and integrity.
With the midterms looming, President Trump may have decided to replace his attorney general while his party still controls the Senate. But whomever he chooses, the future at the Justice Department looks like more of the same, and probably worse.
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