After Matt Gaetz’s nomination fell apart, President-elect Donald Trump tapped another Floridian with a controversial history to be his attorney general: Pam Bondi.
“I am proud to announce former Attorney General of the Great State of Florida, Pam Bondi, as our next Attorney General of the United States,” Trump announced Thursday night on Truth Social. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”
While Bondi will be less controversial than Gaetz, she comes with her own set of baggage.
In 2013, while serving as Florida’s first female attorney general, her political committee received a $25,000 contribution from Trump. Her office subsequently declined to investigate the scandal-ridden Trump University.
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That suspicious donation led to the unraveling of Trump’s longtime charity when the New York Attorney General’s Office eventually took down The Donald J. Trump Foundation, Inc., a tax-exempt nonprofit that wasn’t allowed to make political donations.
Although Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and his company executives long maintained that the donation was a simple mistake, emails unearthed years later proved that Trump’s personal assistant was specifically told by Bondi’s team that her group was an Electioneering Communications Organization — a political organization that by its very nature cannot receive a charity’s funds. And yet Trump still sent Bondi a check and a signed letter that read, “Dear Pam: You are the greatest!” (He misspelled her name as “Pam Biondi.”)
A representative at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the government watchdog group that originally exposed this illegal deal, later called emails “a smoking gun.”
In 2014, she convinced then-Gov. Rick Scott to postpone an execution, due to it conflicting with a reelection fundraiser.
And in 2019, Bondi controversially joined a Republican effort to overturn Obamacare, seeking to end protections for people with pre-existing conditions without an alternative health care plan in place.
More recently, Bondi has been a vocal critic of the DOJ’s investigation into Trump. And if confirmed, she’d be in a position to immediately end Jack Smith’s federal case against the president-elect.
“What it comes down to is who was going to do exactly what Trump wanted, which was to flush the pipes there and reform the DOJ,” a strategist close to the Trump transition told NOTUS. “What are they going to say? ‘It’s a woman, oh shit’?”
Bondi definitely wasn’t who Republican senators had in mind after learning Gaetz had withdrawn. Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz both were mentioned, as was Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Bondi, like Gaetz and defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth came out of left field.
Currently, Bondi lobbies for Ballard Partners, the firm run by prominent Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard. And she previously served on Trump’s commission to combat drug addiction.
Gaetz was Trump’s original nominee because he told Trump he would “crack some skulls,” the strategist said. Bondi is the same kind of pick.
The strategist added that it’s not about an excellent lawyer leading the DOJ — it’s about someone loyal to Trump doing his bidding.
“When you think about it, it should come as a surprise to nobody,” the strategist said.
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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