The Memo: Bondi’s failure to get Trump his ‘scalps’ sealed her fate |
The Memo: Bondi’s failure to get Trump his ‘scalps’ sealed her fate
President Trump’s biggest fans and strongest critics agree on something: The downfall of Pam Bondi as attorney general had two causes.
The largest failure was her inability to secure convictions of the president’s enemies despite his adamant urging that she should do so.
“He is looking for scalps but she hasn’t delivered,” said one GOP strategist well connected to Trump’s orbit, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She didn’t deliver the kind of results that the president was hoping for. She tried and didn’t succeed — and in Trump World that doesn’t fly.”
Trump’s critics have the slimmest sliver of sympathy with Bondi in that regard. They contend a vengeful president expected her to accomplish the impossible — securing guilty verdicts without clear and compelling evidence. But, they also note, she was an eager partner in that quest.
The second key problem — Bondi’s stumbles over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — accumulated even more headlines. Those missteps cost her goodwill from the MAGA grassroots to the West Wing.
A source who worked in the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the early phase of Trump’s current term traced Bondi’s downfall to the high-profile White House event at which social media influencers were handed binders titled, “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”
Those binders garnered blowback even among the president’s supporters because they contained virtually no new revelations.
“She lost the office when she handed out the binders to the influencers,” this source said of the event, which took place little more than a month after Trump returned to power. “You start off in a hole you dug for yourself.”
The former DOJ source claimed that Bondi herself was closely involved in the granular detail of........