President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he was ousting Pam Bondi as attorney general, ending a tumultuous 14-month tenure in which she transformed the Justice Department into a tool for avenging the president’s grievances but frustrated him with her struggles to prosecute his enemies and her handling of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The president called Bondi “a Great American Patriot” and loyal friend in a social media post about her departure. He named Todd Blanche, Bondi’s chief deputy and Trump’s former personal lawyer, to take over as acting attorney general until a permanent replacement could be confirmed.
“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed important new job in the private sector, to be announced in the near future,” Trump wrote. He did not elaborate on the new position.
Bondi, in a post of her own, said she remains “eternally grateful for the trust that President Trump placed in me to Make America Safe Again.” She said her transition out of the job would take place over the next month.
Bondi’s departure makes her the second Cabinet secretary Trump has ousted in the span of weeks, following his decision last month to remove Kristi L. Noem as homeland security secretary. Within minutes of Trump’s announcement Thursday, names of possible successors began circulating among Republican lawmakers, conservative influencers and prominent Trump allies.
The president has privately discussed Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, as a possible replacement in recent days, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss those conversations.
He met with Zeldin at the White House, a different person with knowledge of the matter said, though the purpose of the meeting was to discuss insurance issues related to homes burned in California wildfires. It was unclear whether Trump discussed Justice Department matters with Zeldin.
Other names floated by those outside the White House included Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a staunch ally of the president in Congress; Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; and Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington and a former Fox News host who has sought — and often failed — to bring cases against several of Trump’s most prominent rivals.
Bondi, a former state attorney general in Florida, landed the job as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer after Trump’s first pick, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), withdrew from consideration in 2024 amid allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied.
A Trump loyalist who had defended him during his first impeachment and later backed his claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, Bondi presented the type of TV-ready persona that the president has appeared drawn to while filling out the Cabinet for his second term.
But during her time leading the Justice Department, Trump had repeatedly expressed frustration with Bondi’s pace — and limited success — in overseeing efforts to target his rivals. And for months, he has fumed as the Justice Department’s public release of files connected to its investigations of Epstein has divided his own party and remained a persistent point of political pain.
Bondi had succeeded in holding on to her job despite that criticism in part through a strong personal relationship with the president, public displays of loyalty and a seemingly unwavering willingness to respond to Trump’s demands.
But signs that his goodwill had finally run out emerged in conversations between them on Wednesday, as Trump signaled to Bondi that her time as attorney general was coming to an end, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of the president’s thinking.
At the time, Trump indicated he had not made a final decision on the matter. And the same day, Bondi was by his side as they attended oral arguments at the Supreme Court over his executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship in the United States.
Bondi had pressed Trump for more time on the job, the person with knowledge of the Wednesday conversation said. By Thursday, though, the president had decided against it.
It was not immediately clear what prompted his ultimate decision. Ousting Bondi is something the president “had been mulling for a long time, for a variety of reasons” and “ultimately, he just decided there needed to be a change at the DOJ,” the person said.
“He liked Pam a lot personally,” the person added, “but was not satisfied with her job performance.”
Bondi was scheduled to testify this month, under subpoena, before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the department’s release of millions of pages of material from the Epstein investigation — her third appearance on Capitol Hill to discuss the matter since the Justice Department began publishing the Epstein records last year.
Republicans on the committee who soured on Bondi’s handling on the matter voted in March to compel her testimony — a move that surprised the committee’s chair, Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky). Comer said Thursday that he would confer with Republicans and the Justice Department on whether that deposition would still take place now that Bondi is leaving the role.
Democrats cheered on Bondi’s departure, but many said they still expected Bondi to comply with the committee’s subpoena. Rep. Robert Garica, the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, vowed Bondi “would not escape accountability.”
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) called her “the wrong choice from the start.”
“But the rot at the Department of Justice begins and ends with Donald Trump,” he said in a statement posted on social media. “As long as his focus is on using DOJ as a tool for revenge and not law enforcement, the cover up of the Epstein files, along with the countless other problems at DOJ, will continue.”
Bondi’s tenure was, in many ways, defined by her unyielding willingness to respond to Trump’s demands and desire to reshape the Justice Department in his image.
She oversaw the hollowing out of much of the department’s ranks, firing scores of experienced prosecutors deemed insufficiently loyal to the president, including many of those who had worked on cases against Trump. Other Justice Department attorneys departed willingly as Bondi continued to shatter institutional norms that had long kept the agency at arm’s length from the White House.
Her defenders praised her efforts to refocus the Justice Department on issues such as illegal immigration and violent crime while addressing what she has repeatedly described as the “weaponization” of the department under President Joe Biden.
During Biden’s term, the department twice indicted Trump under his attorney general, Merrick Garland, and drew criticism from Republicans for investigations they say unfairly targeted conservatives — probes Garland repeatedly defended as being driven not by politics but rather the facts and the law.
Bondi, by contrast, unwaveringly acquiesced to nearly all of Trump’s requests that she target his political rivals — a willingness that has prompted some to accuse her of overseeing the true weaponization of the department.
Still, she had faced persistent criticism, including from conservatives, with the Epstein issue lingering throughout her time at the Justice Department.
Bondi’s previous efforts to combat disapproval from lawmakers over the Epstein files — including a bombastic February appearance before the House Judiciary Committed in which she lobbed scripted insults at Democrats and repeatedly praised the president — have done little to quell the controversy.
Some within Trump’s own party had called for her termination as early as February 2025 — the month Bondi was confirmed to lead the Justice Department — after she told Fox News she had a list of Epstein’s clients sitting on her desk that she would soon make public. (The department later said no such list existed.)
She followed up those statements by inviting a group of handpicked influencers to the White House, where she distributed binders labeled “Epstein Files: Phase 1.” The move quickly drew backlash from even some of those invited to the spectacle, who concluded there was virtually no new information included in those files.
Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles — a staunch Bondi ally — told Vanity Fair last year that the attorney general had “completely whiffed” the handling of that initial release.
Facing sustained pressure to disclose more information, the Justice Department launched a new initiative last spring to scour the millions of pages of documents it had amassed over years investigating Epstein. But it said in July, along with the FBI, that it had found no “client list” and no basis to charge anyone else in connection with Epstein’s crimes.
That conclusion sparked outrage among House Republicans on Capitol Hill, who mounted a successful campaign late last year to pass legislation compelling the public release of the files. More recently, some prominent Republicans aimed their fire at the rollout of the release, accusing Justice Department officials of failing to shield victims’ personal information and redacting key information to protect prominent people in Epstein’s circle.
Trump, who had a long-standing friendship with Epstein and has said he knew Epstein socially in Palm Beach, Florida, before they had a falling out in the mid-2000s, appears repeatedly in the files — a fact Democrats have pounced on as they’ve joined the Republican push for broader accountability. Trump has not been accused of participating in Epstein’s criminal conduct.
Yet even as that controversy consumed much of the first year of his second term in office, Trump was also growing increasingly frustrated on what he viewed Bondi’s failures to secure convictions against his political enemies.
Last fall, he demanded on social media — in a message directly addressed to “Pam” — that the Justice Department move swiftly to prosecute perceived foes like former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The department later brought criminal charges against both, but those cases were thrown out over issues with the appointment of the U.S. attorney Trump selected to oversee them.
Since then, the Justice Department has opened investigations into other prominent Trump targets including former CIA director John Brennan, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and a group of Democratic lawmakers who had urged members of the military to refuse illegal orders.
None of those probes have yet to result in charges and, in some cases, grand juries have rejected prosecutors’ efforts to secure indictments.
“We can’t delay any longer,” Trump fumed on social media last fall. “It’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
The department has also launched inquiries aimed at substantiating Trump’s long-held grievances over his 2020 election loss, which remains a central fixation for the president despite repeated audits and investigations that have found no evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to sway the results.
Blanche, who as the Justice Department’s No. 2 official played a central role in overseeing many of those investigations, will now face that pressure to produce results while serving as acting attorney general.
As the lawyer who defended Trump in many of the criminal cases he faced in his years out of office, he shares the president’s sense of grievance over those prosecutions and has taken on an unusually public — and pugilistic — role speaking for the department as Bondi’s deputy.
In recent remarks, Blanche decried court rulings that have blocked elements of the president’s agenda and suggested last year that the administration is “at war” with the courts.
Writing on social media Thursday, Blanche praised Bondi for “her leadership and friendship” and thanked Trump “for the trust and the opportunity to serve.”
“We will continue backing the blue, enforcing the law, and doing everything in our power to keep America safe,” he wrote.
Kadia Goba and Salvador Rizzo contributed to this article.
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