Bondi Couldn’t Do the Impossible |
In a nutshell, President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi for failing to execute the impossible mission he had given her. But it’s not as if she didn’t try.
From the president’s standpoint, lawfare — the leveraging of the government’s law enforcement apparatus against political enemies and for partisan ends — is a strategy that must be used because it was used against him. It is immaterial to him that there may be insufficient evidence to bring cases against his targets — James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell, et al. — because, as Trump sees it, Democratic prosecutors put him through the punitive process. They tried to humiliate and bankrupt him, whether there were viable cases or not. (On that score, I believe Trump has drunk his own Kool-Aid and is convinced that the Mar-a-Lago documents and January 6 cases were as absurd as the New York hush-money and civil fraud cases.)
From a prosecutor’s standpoint, it’s a different calculus. Bondi may be politically sympathetic to Trump’s point of view. (She must have convinced him that she was, or she wouldn’t have been appointed.) But, as a prosecutor, it was her obligation not to charge unless she was confident that a rational juror could find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Beyond the ethical challenge, there is another professional problem: The pols can carp from the cheap seats, but the prosecutor is the one who gets humiliated if the case is a joke. And while the pols can embarrass themselves and move on to the next political controversy, the prosecutor who has lost credibility with the courts is toast professionally.
A lawyer has to decide from the start: I am going to enforce the law without fear or favor, or I am going to be loyal to my patron for whom the law is not a compass. You can’t do both. There are many ways in which Bondi came up short: She didn’t have DOJ experience, she’s not a good communicator, her instincts aren’t great. But in the end, the job on the terms offered was one at which it was impossible to succeed.