Dem
47
GOP
53
Career lawyers at the Department of Justice are relieved that Matt Gaetz isn't going to be their boss. He knows nothing about being a prosecutor and even less about justice and couldn't care less. All he wants to do is please the Dear Leader.
Pam Bondi is a question mark at this point. She was Florida's AG for 8 years, so she definitely knows what AGs do for a living: put crooks in jail. There is no reason to think she didn't do her job well there. Her background as a prosecutor is probably stronger than most recent AGs before they got the job with the feds. Current AG Merrick Garland, for example, had a few years as a U.S. attorney and another few as assistant AG, but for much of his career he was in private practice and later a judge.
So Bondi definitely has a strong background in law enforcement. On the other hand, she has been there for Trump from the beginning. Will she be a vehicle for harassing and indicting Trump's enemies? She certainly sounds like it. One former prosecutor said: "So is she going to just be a somewhat more palatable, esthetically more enhanced version of Gaetz or something else?" It is very likely the Senate will confirm her, so we will find out soon.
One thing we do know is that Bondi is at least garden-variety corrupt. In 2008, then-New York AG Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit against Trump University for defrauding students, promising to teach them how to become real estate millionaires and then giving them incompetent instructors whose advice was: "Buy low, sell high." As Florida AG, Bondi received 22 complaints from Floridians who felt Trump cheated them with a worthless real estate course. She was about to join Schneiderman's lawsuit (which does show that in her pre-Trump period, she was doing her job correctly). Then a $25,000 donation to her reelection campaign arrived from Trump and she dropped the case. What strikes us is how even a relatively small donation had a big effect on her. We have more respect for politicians who are at least smart enough to demand a mid-six-figure "donation" or more to avoid prosecuting the donor on a serious charge. Oh, and Trump didn't make the donation out of his own pocket. His "charitable foundation" did. That is illegal. You expected something else?
On the other hand, although she may be corrupt, she made a smart bet in hitching her wagon to Trump. She has supported him in public for years. When Trump was on trial in New York in the hush-money case, she showed up to provide moral support. Has she swallowed the Kool-Aid, or was she merely pretending in order to get a job in a potential future Trump 2.0 administration? If the latter, it worked, as she got a top job.
Now that she is AG-designate, she said "Prosecutors will be prosecuted." Does she mean it? Our guess is that she is smart enough to understand that Trump has the attention span of a flea. She may start an investigation of Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, and some of Trump's other "enemies." She will point out to him that she needs to collect enough evidence to win convictions as it would look bad for him if juries ruled that they were not guilty of anything. So the "investigations" could go on for a year and then she could quietly decide there wasn't enough evidence to get guilty verdicts so they would fizzle out. By then Trump would be busy with other things and would have long forgotten about the cases. As long as she never brought up the subject, he might never bother her about it. People who know her have reported that she will not break the law to round up Trump's enemies, but she could pretend to in order to pull the wool over his eyes.
Of course, even if her "attempts" to go after Trump's enemies were just judicial theater to entertain Trump, that doesn't answer the question of what her real priorities would be. Will she target billionaire tax cheats or poor welfare cheats? In Florida, she had a mixed record. After her stint as Florida AG, she worked for the lobbying firm of Ballard Partners, representing clients including Qatar, Amazon, General Motors, and Uber. She also fought to overturn the Affordable Care Act and against the legalization of marijuana. It is safe to say that in cases that pit a giant corporation against an individual, she will side with the giant corporation. She is very conservative and deeply religious and spent years fighting against same-sex marriage. But if her only real sin is not demanding a much bigger "donation" to let Trump U. off the hook, chalk that up to naiveté. In the end, she might not be worse than other Republican AGs like Jeff Sessions, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Edwin Meese, and John Mitchell. She might even be better than some of them. That's a low Barr to clear, though. (V)