No person Trusts Pam Bondi
U.S. lawyer common Pam Bondi throughout a July 8 cupboard assembly on the White Home.
Picture: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg through Getty Photographs
On my first day as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for the Southern District of New York, I obtained “the Reservoir Speech.”
Justice Division alums are nodding in recognition; all of us received some variation of the discuss. In broad strokes: Consider DOJ as a reservoir and the water in it as public belief. It takes years to construct up that water provide, however even a slight crack can drain it rapidly. Now that you simply’re a part of the Justice Division, you’ll benefit from the doubt, and judges and most of the people will imagine you due to that hard-earned public belief. Don’t be the one to crack the reservoir and drain it.
After simply 5 months main the Justice Division, Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi is threatening to depart the reservoir tapped out. She has confirmed the worst fears of Democrats who opposed her from the beginning, and now she’s pulled off the harder activity of alienating conservatives and the pro-Trump MAGA base (these two classes not essentially being one and the identical).
Liberals distrusted Bondi all alongside. She wasn’t fairly as outrageous a range for AG as Matt Gaetz, who by no means made it to the affirmation stage; no less than Bondi had been a prosecutor for over 20 years, together with two phrases because the lawyer common of Florida. In contrast to Gaetz, she was certified — on paper.
However Bondi’s pure political antagonists doubted her credibility. After the 2020 election, Bondi falsely proclaimed that “we gained Pennsylvania … we’re thrilled to have gained Pennsylvania,” regardless of Trump’s loss by over 80,000 votes. Bondi publicly cited “proof of dishonest” and “faux ballots.” No such proof ever materialized. And Bondi went past rhetoric. She strategized with different Trump advisers to make use of these false claims to problem the 2020 election ends in the courts. When Bondi was questioned at her February 2025 affirmation listening to about her election lies, she retreated to the bullshit signifier normal by different Trump-loyal power-seekers: “President Biden is the president of america. He was duly sworn in.”
Throughout her brief stint as AG, Bondi has continued to prevaricate, casually at instances and tactically at others. In April 2025, she boldly proclaimed that Trump had single-handedly saved 258 million lives by seizing harmful fentanyl. (The day earlier than, she had posited that Trump had saved a piddling 119 million lives.) Apparently, if not for the president, about three-fourths of the American public can be lifeless proper now.
Extra consequentially, Bondi confirmed herself to be each a hopeless partisan — that half was already broadly suspected — and an inveterate truth-stretcher when she refused even to open an investigation into the misuse of the Sign messaging app by high intelligence officers. To elucidate her inaction, Bondi preposterously concluded (regardless of having carried out zero investigation) that particular details about impending navy assault plans was one way or the other “not categorised and inadvertently launched.”
None of that made a dent with Trump loyalists, nonetheless. It took the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, with all its attendant conspiracy-mongering, to show them towards the lawyer common.
Bondi, it’s possible you’ll recall, marched into the AG’s suite promising jaw-dropping revelations concerning the notorious youngster molester’s expanded community. In February 2025 on Fox Information, she teased an impending preliminary launch of Epstein-related supplies as “breaking information.” Credulous conservative influencers posed on the White Home garden, self-importantly holding aloft binders marked “The Epstein Recordsdata: Section I.” Turned out, these binders contained about 200 pages of paperwork, most of which had been beforehand launched and none of which established something new or attention-grabbing.
Some Republican officers and plenty of within the right-wing media universe flipped out at Bondi’s failure to ship as promised. Republican consultant Anna Paulina Luna vented on X, “THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a whole disappointment.”
Frantically backtracking, Bondi promised extra nonetheless. She vowed {that a} second, even juicier doc dump was imminent and claimed she had one way or the other been duped by miscreant FBI brokers who withheld hundreds of paperwork. When requested on Fox Information concerning the purportedly incriminating, undisclosed Epstein “shopper checklist,” Bondi promised, “It’s sitting on my desk proper now to evaluate.”
However this week, Bondi’s personal Justice Division acknowledged it was all flimflam. DOJ investigators concluded in an inner memo that, after an exhaustive evaluate of over 300 gigabytes of knowledge and bodily proof, there was nothing to the wildest of the conspiracy theories: no incriminating shopper checklist, no blackmail, no jailhouse homicide, no foundation to research or cost anyone else. The report supplied a pointy rebuke to Epstein conspiracy theorists: “One in all our highest priorities is combating youngster exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of these ends.” And the memo introduced a blunt finish level: “No additional disclosure can be applicable or warranted.” (If Bondi knew what she was doing, she by no means would have wandered aimlessly down the trail of revealing info from closed prison investigations within the first place.)
Hearken to The Counsel podcast
Subscribe on:
When requested about Bondi’s apparently false assertion that she had the (nonexistent) shopper checklist on her desk, White Home Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt supplied up cringey phrase salad: “Sure, she was saying the whole thing of all the paperwork, all the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. That’s what the lawyer common was referring to.” Effectively, that explains that.
This week, Bondi tried at a Cupboard assembly to spin her personal prior fib about having the “shopper checklist” on her desk whereas Trump, visibly agitated, snapped, “Are you continue to speaking about Jeffrey Epstein? This man’s been talked about for years. You’re asking — we’ve got Texas, we’ve got this, we’ve got all the issues. And are folks nonetheless speaking about this man? This creep? That’s unbelievable.” On this second, Trump was completely spot on in his exasperation.
MAGA tradition isn’t taking it properly. One right-wing influencer posted, “At this level she simply needs to be fired.” One other lamented that Bondi’s response to the Epstein scenario “makes Trump and his total administration look so unhealthy I don’t even have phrases for it.” Heavyweight firebrand Tucker Carlson accused Bondi of “protecting up crimes.” Laura Loomer known as Bondi a “dumb mendacity bimbo” and urged Trump to fireplace her. Megyn Kelly excoriated the AG for being “both lazy and incompetent or she willingly humiliated among the president’s most loyal supporters;” Kelly predicted that Bondi’s “days are numbered.”
Bondi probably isn’t going anyplace anytime quickly. She’s too loyal to Trump to seek out herself in imminent hazard. However she’d be properly suggested to recollect two issues about Trump. First, he’s delicate to criticism from sure media retailers, particularly right-wing influencers. And second, Trump will cashier an AG who he doesn’t belief to serve his greatest political functions. Recall his humiliating public dismissal of Jeff Classes through Twitter, moments after the 2018 midterms, and his sudden parting of how with Invoice Barr in December 2020, simply days after Barr known as out Trump’s election-fraud nonsense.
Bondi was by no means going to win over liberals or Trump haters. However she one way or the other managed to sling so many false guarantees that she’s earned the ire of a lot of Trump’s most loyal supporters. Now she’s left that reservoir of credibility — DoJ’s and her personal — bone dry.
Elie Honig is the writer of the forthcoming e-book When You Come on the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump, accessible for preorder now.
