Public opinion of Attorney General Pam Bondi has cratered, with a recent poll finding public opinion of her has plunged nearly 50 percent in the last 10 months, a striking referendum on one of the Trump administration’s most prominent figures handling hot-button issues such as deportations and the Epstein files.
Bondi’s popularity peaked in February, according to polling from AtlasIntel, when she had a net six percent positive image with respondents. Since then, Americans have largely turned on the former Florida attorney general, and they now hold a 41-point net negative view of Bondi.
The latest polling, based off answers from 2,315 respondents, captured public sentiment in the week ending on Friday, December 19, when Bondi’s Justice Department faced a statutory deadline to release the Epstein files.
While the DOJ has started releasing some files, the disclosure has been marked with delay and controversy. Scores of files now available to the public have been heavily redacted, angering Epstein survivors. The department also deleted then restored a file from its public portal containing photos of Donald Trump, raising suspicions of political interference, which the DOJ denied.
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers have threatened to bring contempt charges against Bondi, arguing the DOJ has failed to release hundreds of thousands of pages of Epstein material it is required to under a law Trump signed in November.
Bondi, as the nation’s top legal official, has often been the face of the administration’s Epstein policy.
It was the attorney general who handed out binders of Epstein material to conservative influencers at the White House in February, and it was her DOJ that in July threw cold water on the prospect of further investigations into Epstein links, a posture critics have alleged may be to shield Trump from any further scrutiny over his past friendship with the late convicted sex offender.
The perception that the Trump administration was seeking to tip the scales on the Epstein process was only furthered when the Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Justice Department, quietly moved Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell to a lower-security facility over the summer after she sat for an interview with a top DOJ official who was once Trump’s personal lawyer.
The Independent has contacted the DOJ for comment.
The Trump administration has denied the president had any knowledge of or involvement in Epstein’s crimes, and the DOJ has insisted it is not trying to protect any political figures in the Epstein file process but has withheld certain materials to maintain victims’ privacy.
Bondi has attracted controversy elsewhere too.
In September, the president posted a highly unusual message on social media calling for the attorney general, an independent law enforcement official, to prosecute a series of Trump’s political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Leticia James. Cases against both figures soon followed, though they’ve both since faced legal hurdles.
That same month, Bondi attracted criticism from civil rights experts after she called for a wide-ranging hate speech prosecution against those who celebrated the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, even though almost all speech outside of active violent threats is constitutionally protected.
Outside speech issues, the Trump administration has raised legal alarms for the tactics of its deportation crackdown. Masked Border Patrol and ICE agents have been accused of racial profiling for carrying out what appear to be random mass stops at locations including Home Depot stores, which these agencies deny.
The Trump administration also fought for months to defend the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man with U.S. citizen children who officials admitted had wrongly been sent out of the country despite a court decision blocking such a move.
