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In a rare moment of agreement, both staunch supporters and vocal opponents of President Trump concur on the reasons behind Pam Bondi’s troubled tenure as attorney general.
Her most significant shortcoming was her failure to convict the president’s adversaries, despite Trump’s persistent demands for results.
“He wants results, and she hasn’t delivered,” remarked a Republican strategist, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “She didn’t achieve the outcomes the president expected. She made attempts but fell short — and in Trump’s circle, that’s unacceptable.”
Even Trump’s critics find a modicum of empathy for Bondi’s predicament. They argue that a vindictive president pushed her to achieve convictions without substantial evidence. However, they also point out that she was a willing participant in this endeavor.
The second major issue — Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — attracted even more attention. These missteps eroded her support from both the MAGA base and the White House.
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 the binders event, including the design of the front cover of the documents. In the aftermath, the attorney general was left dangerously exposed.
Trump’s White House chief of staff Susie Wiles would later say, in an interview published in Vanity Fair, that Bondi’s initial moves on Epstein “completely whiffed” and that she gave the influencers “binders full of nothingness.”
In terms of the bigger picture, Bondi’s comment in a February 2025 Fox News interview that there was an Epstein client list “sitting on my desk right now” lit the fuse for public uproar that exploded when no such disclosure materialized.
A long, politically damaging chain of events for Trump ensued — including him being forced into a last-minute U-turn where he acceded to a congressional measure forcing the release of the Epstein files rather than face defeat.
Critics of the Trump-Bondi alliance won’t be shedding any tears about her fate, of course.
From their vantage point, the president has been busily trying to weaponize the justice system to punish his opponents and protect his friends — and Bondi went fully along with that plan until she was thwarted by the courts.
The most notable examples cited are investigations into former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. All three efforts have run aground, at least for the moment, pending appeals.
Last November, a judge dismissed the indictments against Comey and James on the basis that an interim U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, had been appointed unconstitutionally.
Just weeks ago, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg quashed subpoenas issued by the DOJ against Powell. A withering Boasberg in essence accused the government of using the powers of the justice system to pressure Powell to either resign or to lower interest rates in accordance with Trump’s demands.
“The government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime; indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual,” Boasberg wrote.
Harry Litman, who served as a U.S. attorney during the Clinton administration, said that Bondi’s tenure “will be marked in history as the worst of any Attorney General. She was unbelievably slavish toward Trump. She did everything and anything he wanted, including reprisal prosecutions.”
Litman saw some measure of poetic justice in the attorney general’s eventual defenestration by Trump.
“He just wanted convictions against his enemies, and he couldn’t understand why she couldn’t achieve them,” Litman said.
“He didn’t seem to appreciate either that there is a grand jury process or that things went awry notwithstanding her concerted efforts to make them happen.”
The end came fairly swiftly for Bondi, of whom Trump had said shortly before her firing was “a wonderful person” who “is doing a good job.”
In a social media post soon after 1 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Trump instead announced that Bondi would be “transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.”
Trump also noted that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche would take on Bondi’s role in an acting capacity.
Blanche’s elevation will do nothing to calm those who fear the president’s impulses to bend the justice system to his will. Blanche, a former personal lawyer to Trump, is every bit as dogged a defender of the president as Bondi.
As for Bondi, she released a statement on social media saying she would be “working tirelessly to transition the office of Attorney General to the amazing Todd Blanche.”
The gentle words didn’t fool anyone — including veterans of previous Trump upheavals.
“It’s pretty much inevitable that you get turned on in MAGAland — even though they’re not framing it that way,” said Stephanie Grisham, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary in 2019 and 2020 but later became more critical of the president.
“At the end of the day, I wish them all well as they move through a very tough process.”
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.