J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next attorney general, listens during a meeting at the Capitol in Washington, December 2, 2024.
Senate hearings for nominees of Donald Trump’s cabinet begin today, with more than a dozen scheduled this week. All of them are critical in their own way, with millions of lives and trillions of dollars in the balance. But I’m going to focus in on Wednesday’s hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee with attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, who has gotten lost amid some of the more controversial picks (including the original choice for this job, fellow Floridian Matt Gaetz).
Bondi perfectly represents how crime and punishment will likely be handled in the second Trump term. She has no moral qualms with basing her prosecutorial discretion on money, power, and proximity to the president. Indeed, her primary client is less likely to be the people of the United States than it is Donald Trump. In her hands, Trump can use the stick of legal action as an intimidation scheme to get corporate America to do his bidding. Considering the surfeit of cases being left in Bondi’s care from the Biden administration, that’s incredibly dangerous for the rule of law.
According to a great tracker from Public Citizen, there are over 250 active investigations and cases against more than 200 corporations over various forms of misconduct. A good number of these are at the Justice Department, against such corporations as Abbott Labs, Amazon, Boeing, Block, ByteDance (owners of TikTok), private prison firm CoreCivic, CVS, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Northrop Grumman, OceanGate (the company that launched the Titan submersible), Pfizer, Phillips 66, Polymarket, SAP, ServiceNow, SpaceX, Steward Health, Super Micro, Tenet Media, Tether, Tesla, and Toyota. That’s just a partial list.
In addition, there are active investigations or cases from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division against Apple, Google, Nvidia, Live Nation/Ticketmaster, RealPage and several landlords who used the service, UnitedHealth, Visa, and more. Since the election, there have been several dozen merger announcements, many of which will have to be adjudicated by the Justice Department as well. In short, a large chunk and maybe the majority of the economy will be shaped by the decisions of the nation’s top law enforcement agency in the weeks and months to come. And Pam Bondi will have the final word on all of that.
Simply put, she has not proven herself trustworthy to this task.
All you need to know about Bondi is that, shortly after winning office as Florida attorney general, she fired the two highest-level prosecutors investigating the biggest scandal of the century thus far: the widespread, systematic use of fake documents in courts throughout the country as a pretext to dispossess ten million families of their homes during the Great Recession. Bondi did this for a simple reason: She received tens of thousands of dollars from one of the firms caught up in this mass document fabrication scheme, a company named Lender Processing Services, and she used her office as a shield protecting that company from sanction.
Bondi’s direct clients, or clients of the firm where she worked, have multiple interlocking legal actions before the agency that Bondi wishes to lead.
This was not a one-off incident. During her tenure as AG, Bondi was seen by corporate interests as something like their hired hand. There are numerous examples of Bondi being targeted by lobbying firms, and not only asked to drop cases against their clients, but enlisted in efforts to get other states to back off.
One lobbying firm, Dickstein Shapiro, represented LPS, for-profit college network Bridgepoint, multilevel marketer Herbalife, and health care billing firm Accretive. All were under threat from states other than Florida; the lobbyist introduced Bondi to those companies’ lawyers, or simply pressured Bondi to back off, and she complied. Dickstein also represented the parent company of online travel sites Travelocity and Priceline. Florida had filed a lawsuit against that company before Bondi entered office, but after Dickstein consulted her, she suddenly dropped the case. Bondi received lavish gifts from the Republican Attorneys General Association, which Dickstein donates to, during this time. Dickstein also helped Bondi get a cover story in a corporate lawyer trade magazine, pointing to her as a rising star.
Bondi even declined to join a civil fraud case against Trump University, the president-elect’s for-profit college scheme, after the Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to her political action committee.
This leaves the distinct impression that with Bondi, justice is up for auction.
After leaving the AG’s office, Bondi almost immediately became a registered lobbyist, and two recent reports detail her time in that position. Public Citizen reviewed disclosures and found that Bondi represented 30 different domestic and foreign clients for Ballard Partners, the same lobbying firm at which Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles worked. Bondi’s clients included Amazon, which is under Justice Department investigation right now over whether it hid evidence of workplace safety violations at its warehouses. GEO Group, the private prison company that stands to gain heavily from the policies of mass deportation, was another Bondi client; DOJ has an open civil rights investigation against its top rival, CoreCivic, over lack of protections for incarcerated people.
Other clients include General Motors, Uber, and Major League Baseball. As Accountable.us noted in its report, the Justice Department settled with GM in 2023 on a hiring discrimination investigation, and fined the company over trying to influence a federal investigation into an accident by its former self-driving unit Cruise. Uber settled a case with DOJ in 2022 over alleged violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act. And Major League Baseball has lobbied against DOJ’s repeated attempts to strip its antitrust exemption.
Meanwhile, Bondi’s firm Ballard Partners also represents many clients with business before the Justice Department, including: Boeing, whose plea agreement with DOJ over its machinations in getting the deadly 737 MAX approved was rejected by a federal judge; Blackstone, whose LivCor unit is one of the named defendants in the algorithmic pricing scheme involving RealPage; and Google, which was found liable of monopolization last year in a Justice Department case and which is fighting a remedy that would partially break up the company, while also fighting a different DOJ case that targets the company’s monopoly in advertising technology.
In other words, Bondi’s direct clients, or clients of the firm where she worked, have multiple interlocking legal actions before the agency that Bondi wishes to lead. The recusals any normal official would undertake because of this prior history would leave Bondi sidelined for many if not most of the important decisions the Justice Department will have to make. No less than Brian Ballard, the founder of Ballard Partners, told The New York Times that Bondi couldn’t be expected to recuse from all of his firm’s clients, because “We represent such a broad array of American business.”
Ex-lobbyists have run the Justice Department before. Bill Barr was Verizon’s general counsel and ran an advocacy group, and yes, Eric Holder was a lobbyist. But Bondi is a step beyond, because her history includes not only lobbying but being very solicitous of lobbying, which is about the worst possible quality in an attorney general.
Trump allies talk about the “weaponization” of the Justice Department under Biden. This is a weaponization of a far different kind. It could turn the nation’s top law enforcer into a corporate gatekeeper, waving through misconduct that would affect millions of workers and customers (at least for those willing to pay the right people), or training the armaments of justice on disfavored companies. Lobbyists—by their own words—believe they were at the controls of Bondi’s office in Florida, and they have reason to believe they could stage-manage Main Justice in Washington, too. And that plays well with Trump’s bullying; with the Justice Department as his willing servant, his warnings to companies carry greater weight.
Despite all this, Bondi has not been slotted in the category of “controversial” nominees. Her nomination has generated slight criticism; mostly, she hasn’t been noticed at all. Democrats have contented themselves with getting through the cabinet nominations and even crossing the aisle to vote for some of them. But in Bondi’s hands, the Justice Department would be the main engine by which Trump’s pay-to-play America will manifest. If you have enough money to hire a K Street rainmaker, you can demonstrably flout the law, and if you don’t follow the regime’s demands, the law will find a way to mess with you. That’s what Bondi represents. The silence from Democrats over her is a form of tacit agreement with this troubling possibility.
