In just eight months on the job, Attorney General Pam Bondi has presided over a period of profound transition at the Justice Department — overseeing mass firings and internal reorganizations, an unprecedented crackdown on illegal immigration and the pursuit of Donald Trump’s prosecutorial revenge tour, to name just a few of the most significant developments.
But while that has all been going on, Bondi has been engaged in another, albeit subtler public project — a fundamental reshaping of what it means to be the nation’s top law enforcement official. It’s sometimes said that the Justice Department speaks through its court filings, but Bondi has rejected that notion implicitly through her frequent public remarks and appearances since taking office.
In order to take stock of Bondi’s approach during this tumultuous period, we scoured the public record — and watched every single one of her roughly 100 public appearances that we could find. There were her many Fox News interviews, as well as her remarks at a meeting on alleged anti-Christian bias in the federal government and her visit to a DEA drug lab, along with a variety of other venues, including plenty in and outside the White House.
Along the way, there have been some high-profile stumbles, including her interviews on the so-called “Epstein files,” as well as her comments on hate speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, both of which proved politically unhelpful and generated controversy across the political spectrum. But Bondi has otherwise been remarkably consistent, both in the themes and issues that she pursues, and even her language. She has a deceptively simple but in fact highly limited and highly contestable view of the role of federal law enforcement — one that focuses on topics like immigration while effectively writing off whole swathes of the Justice Department’s work, particularly in the white-collar realm. And she never misses a chance to flatter Trump, often in over-the-top and cringeworthy language.
Historically, at least since the Nixon administration, the Justice Department has tried to maintain some independence from the White House. A review of her statements shows that under Bondi and Trump, the public distinction between the two entities has practically disappeared. The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Put it all together, and Bondi has emerged as perhaps the most openly political and partisan attorney general in modern American history — political in the sense that she carefully structures her appearances and rhetoric to track the priorities of the White House with no concern for notions of DOJ independence, and partisan in that she appears to conceive of her role as an advocate for Trump in particular and for the American right more generally.
Let’s go to the tape.
An Openly Political Attorney General
As with many political figures, Bondi’s selection of public appearances — even the manner in which she conducts them — is telling in and of itself. Her choices reflect an acutely political approach to the office of attorney general — one designed, both in substance and appearance, to advance the political objectives and interests of the White House.
Bondi has heavily focused her appearances on conservative media outlets. She is fond of Fox News — we tallied 30 appearances, with 10 appearances on Sean Hannity’s show alone — and has appeared on Newsmax. In September, Bondi sat for a nearly hourlong interview with Katie Miller, a former Trump aide who is the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Bondi has not appeared on NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC or C-SPAN for an interview, though she has had a small number of press conferences in which she has taken questions from members of the media.
Attorneys general have generally tried to demonstrate some sense of independence from the president and the White House, but Bondi has rejected that idea. She has both embraced and visually telegraphed her closeness to Trump and the White House by regularly traveling to the White House to do stand-up interviews just outside the building.
This is likely no accident. Trump has long wanted an attorney general whose loyalty ran to him first and foremost. He was incensed during his first term when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Trump-Russia probe, and when his second attorney general, Bill Barr, refused to endorse Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Bondi’s selection of venues for her speeches is also revealing. She favors photo opportunities concerning immigration and drug enforcement, in particular. Among other outings, she also recorded a video denouncing a supposed “wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties” while Elon Musk was running DOGE, and she conducted a series of interviews on the killings of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk, whose deaths were both used by Republicans to politically attack Democrats.
The idea that the attorney general would advance the president’s law enforcement agenda through public engagement is not necessarily problematic in and of itself, but the particulars and the context both matter. Indeed, what is missing from Bondi’s list of appearances is just as revealing as what has been on it.
Bondi has not conducted a single event or interview, for instance, on the nationwide challenge of financial fraud documented by the FBI.
She has never spoken out in any of her public appearances about the shooting in August at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters. That shooting was apparently perpetrated by an individual who opposed the Covid-19 vaccine and resulted in the killing of a police officer.
Bondi also did not speak up after the murder of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman — a Democrat — but in a brief aside, she recently said in an interview that the killer “said that they were supporters of” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. That comment was consistent with efforts by Republicans to falsely suggest Hortman’s killer was on the left.
In fact, the killer had a “hit list” of nearly 50 elected officials, all of whom were Democrats, and he also intended to target abortion providers and abortion rights activists. The killer’s friends and former colleagues have said that he held “deeply religious and politically conservative views,” according to the AP.
Lavishing Praise on Trump and His Allies
One of the most consistent features of Bondi’s public remarks is her consistent and effusive praise of Trump. She often lavishes him with compliments that appear designed to stroke the president’s ego and keep her in his good graces, no matter how ridiculous the claim. Bondi often says, for instance, that Trump “overwhelmingly” won the 2024 election — part of an unsubtle, administration-wide effort to suggest that Trump has a strong public mandate for his controversial policies — but as my POLITICO Magazine colleague Michael Schaffer has explained, this is simply not true.
Trump isn’t the only one who has attracted Bondi’s over-the-top praise. She often showered Musk with praise when he was running DOGE, and she has similarly complimented Vice President JD Vance and Miller in public remarks. The throughline, perhaps, is that all three men are close allies of Trump himself.
A Fondness for Talking Points
Bondi is well versed in political messaging and the conservative media ecosystem, and it shows. She has an assertive and strident demeanor that she uses to reiterate political arguments and themes — often linking illegal immigration to gun and drug crimes, as if the three categories of crimes are inherently connected. And like an experienced media professional, she has a preference for soundbites.
Reputable and independent data analysis, however, reveals a far more complex story about her tenure at the Justice Department than the one that she has told publicly.
Bondi often says that she wants to return the DOJ and FBI to their “core” function, which she defines in conspicuously narrow terms to refer only to violent crime. That construct excludes important work that the DOJ and FBI have done for decades — including investigations of white-collar crime, financial fraud and political corruption, among others. (Perhaps not coincidentally Trump was prosecuted in all of those areas prior to his return to office.)
Attorneys general usually do not have their own media-friendly catchphrases, but Bondi is different in this regard as well. She has deployed her own version of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” motto in public appearances all year as a political slogan and messaging vehicle: “Make America Safe Again,” naturally.
Bondi’s messaging discipline was on full display in March, after the Trump administration summarily deported hundreds of men to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison as part of an unprecedented deal in which the U.S. government paid the Salvadoran government millions of dollars to take them.
Bondi portrayed the operation as an unambiguous success, but the administration eventually admitted that it had erroneously and illegally sent at least one person there (Kilmar Abrego Garcia). The detainees have also said that they were subjected to psychological torture in CECOT, as well as physical and sexual abuse — conditions of confinement that would clearly be illegal in U.S. detention facilities.
The administration’s legal argument in support of the effort — rooted in an 18th century wartime powers law known as the Alien Enemies Act — is also deeply flawed, and it has since been rejected by judges across the country. The Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative super-majority has handed Trump a series of victories all year, is expected to resolve the question at some point.
Meanwhile, although Bondi often touts the administration’s work on drug and gun enforcement, the data tells a very different story. According to figures compiled by Syracuse University, the numbers of referrals for federal gun and drug prosecutions have significantly fallen in recent months, likely because the administration shifted federal law enforcement resources to immigration enforcement. A recent report from Reuters likewise found that the number of federal drug prosecutions has “dropped to the lowest level in decades this year.”
The Justice Department is also prosecuting even fewer white-collar and financial fraud cases than it did during Trump’s first term. Child exploitation investigations are being adversely affected, too.
Indeed, Bondi’s rhetorical focus on a narrow set of federal crimes has obscured a significant — and deliberate — shift in the Justice Department’s work under Trump.
Since Trump returned to office, the Justice Department has, among other things, disbanded a task force devoted to foreign election-influence operations, and under Bondi, the administration has significantly reduced the number of prosecutors and FBI agents working on public corruption cases.
Over the course of her public remarks, Bondi has generally avoided discussing these and other critical federal law-enforcement functions. She has not meaningfully discussed cyberespionage, foreign election-influence operations, financial fraud or political corruption — crimes that are not violent but that are highly consequential nonetheless, and that could have considerable national-security implications when left unchecked.
The Trump administration’s proposed DOJ budget reflects this narrower — and riskier — approach to federal law enforcement. The administration has proposed a $2.5 billion reduction in the department’s budget (a roughly 7 percent decline) that would result in a loss of more than 5,000 positions across the department.
Bondi has defended this reduction in testimony before Congress. “Of course, you can always do more with more,” she has said, “but we’re doing more with less.”
As anyone who has ever spent money can attest, this is hard to believe. In fact, the Trump-Bondi Justice Department is doing less with less.
An Unabashed Partisan
In June, when protestors in Los Angeles took to the streets to oppose the Trump administration’s unprecedented deployment of the National Guard, Bondi offered a stark warning in one of her preferred forums — an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show filmed outside the White House. “It looks like a third world country, and it’s not,” she said. “It’s the United States of America. We are not standing for it. Donald Trump won’t stand for it.”
These sorts of hyperbolic and politically charged comments are routine for Bondi, who has used her perch as attorney general to engage in frequent partisan brawling, to criticize the prior Democratic administration and to attack judges — often using claims that are highly tendentious, unambiguously false or straightforwardly silly.
Early during her tenure, for instance, Bondi repeatedly said that the worst things she had found upon entering the Justice Department were pictures of former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hanging on a wall. This would seem to suggest that things were in fact not that bad — and perhaps that Trump’s own DOJ landing team had not competently done its job in swapping presidential portraits — but in Bondi’s telling, those pictures reflected some sort of “Deep State” operation and an enduring rot at the department.
Since then, Bondi has casually suggested that there was “massive” criminal fraud in federal spending under the Biden administration, though nothing of the sort has emerged in any credible form. She has also suggested that the prior administration condoned attacks on police officers despite the fact that Trump himself pardoned hundreds of people who assaulted law enforcement officers during the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Bondi routinely embraces GOP talking points by claiming her Democratic predecessors deliberately let guns, drugs, gangs and illegal immigrants flow into the country. “It was actually anarchy,” she has said.
Bondi has taken that same combative approach when addressing Democrats in Congress — at times responding to substantive concerns and criticism with vitriol and non sequiturs.
In June, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) asked Bondi whether Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons should cover unrelated crimes. “Well, I don’t know if you’re referring to Joe Biden pardoning his son after he said he would not pardon Hunter Biden,” she shot back. As Morelle continued to press her on the Trump pardons, Bondi asked, “Do you mean the ones that were done by the auto-pen?”
Later in that same hearing, Rep. Madeline Dean (D-Pa.) asked Bondi about the Justice Department’s failure to pursue corruption investigations. Bondi pushed back. “You wanna talk about incompetence?” she said at one point.“You’re the one that said Joe Biden on PBS was competent.”
Bondi took a similar tack with Democrats in the other chamber. When Sen. Jack Reed (D-N.H.) asked Bondi what the Justice Department was doing to stop the flow of American weapons into Mexico, the result was a rambling and non-responsive answer that culminated in an attack on Biden. And when Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Or.) asked about the potential for corruption at Trump’s dinner with purchasers of his memecoins, Bondi raised an irrelevant point about a drug trafficker in Oregon and proceeded to angrily assail Merkley and his “liberal state.”
Democrats are not the only targets of Bondi’s ire. She has often attacked judges who have ruled against the Justice Department during her tenure, using inflammatory and partisan language that has closely tracked the language coming from the White House and congressional Republicans.
Even if these attacks were fair — and they are not — they make very little sense as a practical matter. One reason that lawyers avoid attacking judges (at least in public) is that you run the risk of antagonizing both those judges and their colleagues on the bench.
That does not appear to matter to Bondi, whose evident purpose in lobbing these attacks is appealing to Trump, riling up his supporters and deflecting blame for the department’s losses in the lower courts.
Bondi’s political instincts, her high visibility and her outspokenness have also gotten her in political trouble. During her interview with Katie Miller after Kirk’s killing, for instance, she warned about a crackdown on “hate speech” that proved too much even for some conservatives. At the time, the White House was effectively arguing that the entire political left was somehow responsible for Kirk’s death, and Bondi lent that notion some prosecutorial heft.
Bondi faced a wave of criticism for suggesting a serious infringement on free speech, even on the right. She later tried to clean up her comments in a social media post, but the result was legal and conceptual mush, blurring “hate speech” with online “doxing” and actual threats of violence.
It was also yet another overtly partisan outing for the attorney general. “For far too long,” Bondi wrote, “we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence.” She went on to warn the public that they “cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech’” and said that “this violent rhetoric is designed to silence others from voicing conservative ideals.”
Stumbling on the “Epstein Files”
Bondi’s comments after Kirk’s death were not the first time that her regular forays into conservative media — and her evident eagerness to publicly support the White House’s political agenda — have gotten her in trouble.
In February, when Bondi was asked during a Fox News interview whether the Justice Department would release “the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients,” she said — now famously — “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” Days later, at a White House event for MAGA influencers, Bondi distributed declassified binders containing documents related to the Epstein case, but there was little new information in them, which only aggravated the right.
Bondi has since claimed that her comments were misinterpreted, but they contributed to one of the biggest political debacles of Bondi’s tenure to date after the department in July released an unsigned joint memo with the FBI stating that there was no Epstein “client list,” and no evidence of foul play in Epstein’s death. This was despite years of suggestions to the contrary by Trump and his political allies, including FBI Director Kash Patel.
Indeed, prior to that memo, Bondi had given a series of Fox News interviews in which she ratcheted up interest in the Epstein case, particularly among conservatives, and suggested that career DOJ officials were hiding information on Epstein from her and the public.
Suffice to say that Bondi’s cavalier suggestion has not been borne out. The White House and the Justice Department have struggled to tamp down public interest in the subject, and there’s reason to think the Epstein controversy has done real political damage to Trump. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that since the “Epstein files” saga blew up to Trump’s detriment, Bondi has effectively gone silent on the matter.
Embracing “Weaponization”
Since taking office, Bondi has repeatedly denounced what she describes as the “weaponization” of the Justice Department against Trump during the Biden administration.
In fact, the federal cases against Trump — one resulting from his effort to overturn the 2020 election, the other from his decision to take highly classified government documents with him after leaving the White House in 2021 — were well-supported both legally and factually. That has not stopped Bondi from repeatedly claiming that the Justice Department unfairly pursued Trump while vowing that political prosecutions of that sort will no longer happen on her watch.
These comments, of course, are less credible than ever following the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey — a prosecution that appears flimsy at best, and one that Trump very publicly engineered himself. The Comey case is the most significant development to date in Trump’s prosecutorial revenge tour, but it will not be the last. Trump’s public entreaty to Bondi to prosecute Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James was startling even at a time when the Trump administration has made clear that it will no longer respect the once-established wall between the White House and Justice Department on the handling of specific legal cases.
On this issue more than most, Bondi’s public remarks this year have been a very unreliable reflection of reality. Bondi may not admit it, but whether she likes it or not, she now oversees Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department against his political enemies.
Ever the good soldier, Bondi’s rhetoric has shifted lately. In an appearance shortly after Comey’s indictment — an interview with Hannity on Fox News, naturally — she presented Trump’s ongoing campaign of prosecutorial retribution as a legitimate response to the misdeeds of his political adversaries.
“Whether you’re a former FBI director, whether you’re a former head of an intel community, whether you are a current state or local elected official, whether you’re a billionaire funding organizations to try to keep Donald Trump out of office — everything is on the table,” Bondi told Hannity. “We will investigate you, and we will end the weaponization.”
The up-is-down logic was notable but not surprising coming from Bondi — an attorney general who, over the course of eight long months, has made very clear that her loyalties lie first and foremost with Trump and his Republican supporters.
Jacqueline Munis and Riya Misra contributed research for this report.
