Sometimes if both sides are angry at you, you’re doing something right. Other times, everyone simply agrees that you’re awful — as Pam Bondi has shown us throughout her historically disastrous tenure as attorney general.

Bondi’s ouster as AG marks a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. President Donald Trump plainly doesn’t see Bondi’s tenure as any kind of success as he ushers her out the door after just over a year on the job — the shortest of any confirmed AG since the Watergate era. Democrats (and others) cheered Trump’s decision to dispatch Bondi, though for widely varying reasons.

Partisans on both sides concur that Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter has been a debacle. The AG can blame herself for bringing the Epstein case back to wide public attention, as she strode into office promising to reveal shocking information about the notorious child sex trafficker and his network. In February 2025, when asked on Fox News about the Epstein “client list,” Bondi infamously boasted, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” (She later claimed she meant some unspecified set of the Epstein documents and not necessarily a specific smoking-gun document.)

Then followed a whiplash-inducing series of fits and starts. Bondi announced in July 2025 that the Epstein files revealed no uncharged crimes and that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” But in September 2025, she declared that she had opened new criminal probes into various Epstein-adjacent Democrats and that “the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Nobody has been indicted to date, and there’s no indication anyone is being meaningfully investigated.

In November 2025, Congress passed and Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act — and it got worse still. Bondi’s Justice Department produced the first batch of documents over 40 days late and withheld millions of responsive documents for months beyond that. DoJ improperly redacted the names of various men who apparently had engaged in wrongdoing while unforgivably disclosing victims’ identifying information. And when Bondi was called before Congress to testify about her failures, she responded with a public temper tantrum lowlighted by a barrage of canned personal insults and unhinged tirades about the status of the stock market. A new series of memes emerged — “If Pam Bondi Was a Waitress” and the like — and the Trump administration winced at her performance and its public reception.

But don’t let Bondi’s mishandling of the Epstein files overshadow her even more corrosive legacy: the destruction of the Justice Department’s independence.

It’s cliché, and maybe you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s true and it’s worth repeating: The Justice Department must keep prosecution entirely clear of politics. I was trained — indoctrinated, even — on this first principle during my time as a DoJ prosecutor, and I’m grateful for it. Only the Justice Department holds the power to strip an individual’s liberty, to lock a person behind bars — and that power is toxic when mixed with any base desire for political vengeance.

Bondi gleefully embraced the president’s revenge-fueled prosecutorial agenda — though he reportedly canned her in part because she wasn’t aggressive (or effective) enough in executing his payback agenda. But Bondi certainly tried. In September 2025, when Trump publicly called on “Pam” to prosecute his political enemies — including New York attorney general Letitia James, former FBI director James Comey, and U.S. senator Adam Schiff — Bondi snapped to attention. Her prosecutors obtained palpably deficient indictments against Comey and James, which were quickly thrown out by a federal judge for constitutional infirmities around the appointment of unqualified local U.S. Attorneys. Undaunted, the Justice Department tried and failed to reindict and then to re-reindict James. Bondi also has launched and overseen facially retributive criminal investigations of dubious merit against Schiff, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, Fed governor Lisa Cook, former special counsel Jack Smith, and others.

At the same time, Bondi flatly refused to investigate anyone or anything that might ruffle feathers inside the administration. The AG declined to even open an investigation into the misuse of the Signal messaging app by top administration officials; she preposterously concluded (despite having done zero investigation) that specific information about impending military attack plans was somehow “not classified and inadvertently released.” And Bondi refused to gather the facts and conduct a full probe into the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by ICE in Minneapolis. Why take a look when a probe might yield politically inconvenient results?

Pam Bondi is gone now, and she has herself to blame. The stain on the Justice Department will remain.

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