The incoming Trump administration didn’t waste time on Thursday after Matt Gaetz announced he was dropping his bid to become attorney general, announcing former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi would seek the top position at the Justice Department instead.
Bondi, who served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019, is both an experienced public official and a long-time Trump ally. Here’s what you need to know:
Ethical questions around campaign cash in Florida
Trump and Bondi have ties that date back over a decade, to when Bondi was serving as Florida’s first female attorney general.
In 2013, as Bondi’s office was receiving complaints from people alleging they’d been scammed by the future president’s Trump University seminars, her political committee received a $25,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. While New York pursued lawsuits related to the seminars, Florida did not. Both Trump and Bondi have denied the donation was improper or related to the charging decision.
That wasn’t the only campaign-related scandal in Bondi’s time in Florida.
That same year, she persuaded then-Govenor Rick Scott to reschedule the execution of convicted murderer Marshall Lee Fore to accomodate a fundraiser.
“I should not have requested the execution be moved. It had been [delayed] twice,” she said at the time, The Tampa Tribune reported. “I’m sorry. And it will not happen again.”
A record of high-profile cases
Unlike some of the Trump administration’s other nominees, who lack direct government experience related to their cabinet positions, Bondi has a substantial record in public office, and has shown a willingness to take on high-profile cases.
She helped appoint the special prosecutor who investigated the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teen, by a neighborhood watch volunteer.
She also initiated a lawsuit in 2018 against the makers of opioid medications, litigation that eventually culminated in a $3bn settlement with the state of Florida after leaving office. Bondi’s office also sued BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and helped net Florida a more than $2bn payout.
A diehard Trump defender and political ally
Since leaving office, Bondi has been a resolute ally of Trump through his administration, as well as multiple impeachments and criminal investigations.
She served on Trump’s opioids commission and helped coordinate his response to moments when his administration was in peril.
In 2019, Trump hired her to help it fend off its first impeachment investigation, over allegations of a quid pro quo agreement to pressure Ukrainian officials to go after the Biden family.
During the January 6 investigation, meanwhile, Bondi appeared on Fox News and denounced the process as a “show trial,” while reportedly being one of a number of Trumpworld figures to offer jobs to one of the key witnesses, Cassidy Hutchinson.
That support has included latching onto some of Donald Trump’s most inflammatory claims.
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, Bondi joined the chorus of Republican officials accusing Joe Biden and his son Hunter of corruption.
“Our party’s theme tonight is America, the land of opportunity,” Bondi said at the RNC. “But for Joe Biden, it’s been the land of opportunism, not opportunity. As a career prosecutor and former attorney general of Florida, I fought corruption and I know what it looks like, whether it’s done by people wearing pinstripe suits or orange jumpsuits.”
In November of 2020, Bondi was outside the Philadelphia Convention Center with Trump campaign officials as they alleged voter fraud, claiming the Republican had won Pennsylvania even before the state had declared its election results.
The alliance continued after Trump’s election defeat, with Bondi heading Trump-related politicalaction committees, and serving as chair of litigation at the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA-affiliated legal advocacy group that has denounced the prosecutions against Donald Trump as a “weaponization” of the justice system and sought to limit future legal scrutiny of present and former presidents.
The group has argued that the pro-Trump crowd at the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was unfairly prosecuted as the victim of a “two-tiered” justice system
If Bondi is confirmed as attorney general, she would be responsible for the Justice Department’s sprawling January 6 case, the largest prosecution in U.S. history, as well as the department’s response to civil rights cases and allegations of voter fraud
She would be the third woman to serve as the attorney general, and the first under a Republican administration.
