Bondi firing a reminder that even ultra-loyalists get dumped by Trump

Pam Bondi’s swift dismissal on Thursday underscores a reality that has met Trump loyalists from Jeff Sessions to Kristi Noem – no amount of loyalty is enough to save oneself from being dumped by Donald Trump.

Since the president assumed office last year, there have been few people more important to his effort to remake government than Bondi, his longtime friend.

Trump pledged that retribution would be the hallmark of his second term, and Bondi was the chief enforcer from her first day in office. As attorney general, she obliterated the longstanding norm that the justice department be apolitical and keep the White House at an arm’s length. She oversaw purges of career employees who had been assigned to work on the criminal cases against Trump as well as scores of career lawyers with irreplaceable expertise. She also oversaw politically motivated prosecutions against Trump’s political enemies, including former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James.

“Pam Bondi took a sledgehammer to the justice department and its workforce. The DoJ’s independence, integrity, and workforce have degraded more under her leadership than at any other time during the department’s 155-year history,” said Stacey Young, a former justice department lawyer who leads Justice Connection, an advocacy group for DoJ alumni.

“What she destroyed in a year could take decades to rebuild. But we have a president who fired her because she didn’t go far enough,” she added.

Bondi met with prosecutors from the southern district of Florida to discuss the investigation into former CIA director John Brennan and others as recently as Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the matter. But in the end, Bondi’s loyalty to Trump was when she could not fully deliver on the president’s mercurial wishes. Trump reportedly fired her in part because she was unable to make progress on prosecuting his enemies and over the way she handled the Epstein files.

A federal judge dismissed the cases against Comey and James last year after finding the prosecutor overseeing them, also a Trump loyalist, had been unlawfully appointed. Federal grand juries in Virginia also rebuffed efforts to re-indict James. The administration’s failure to move past those safeguards were a blunt reminder of the checks and balances that still exist in the American legal system. It was those same safeguards that appear to have enraged Trump.

Trump’s frustration over how Bondi handled the Epstein files illustrates how the matter continues to haunt his administration. Shortly after she became attorney general, Bondi appeared on Fox News and said the Epstein files were “sitting on my desk”. Months later, the justice department said it would not be releasing any more information, citing the need to protect victims and saying there was no “client list”.

Congress responded by passing a bipartisan law mandating the release of the files. The justice department has released millions of documents to comply with that law, but there are unexplained redactions and documents have appeared and disappeared from the department’s website. Those documents have shed light on a vast network of powerful people who communicated and interacted with Epstein, many of whom have since stepped down from positions of power in the private sector. It has also kept the controversy in the news amid questions about Trump’s own friendship and relationship with Epstein.

Bondi tried to save face with Trump – insulting and sparring pugilistically with members of Congress during public hearings and as recently as Wednesday was meeting with prosecutors and justice department officials to discuss an investigation into CIA director John Brennan and other Trump enemies.

It wasn’t enough.

“Countless and baseless political investigations, hundreds of career law enforcement professionals purged, a massive cover-up of the Epstein files, and a wholesale effort to turn the department into a criminal law firm representing the person of the president instead of the American people,” California senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat who Trump reportedly wants prosecuted, said in a post on X.

“But Pam Bondi was merely a symptom of Donald Trump’s chronic allergy to our nation’s laws. And, in the end, her sycophancy could not prevent the inevitable defenestration that eventually befalls most Trump loyalists.”