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President Trump has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi amid reports of his growing frustration with her failure to prosecute his political enemies and her handling of the Epstein files.
Bondi, Florida's former attorney general, was a Trump loyalist who openly heaped praise on the president and did away with the long-standing Department of Justice practice of maintaining political independence from the White House. "She came in and did the master's bidding, and she did it poorly," says David Cole, law professor at Georgetown University and former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Her firing comes just months after a heated congressional hearing in which she refused to apologize to Epstein survivors for the DOJ's failure to fully redact their names in released documents. Bondi was subpoenaed to appear before the House Oversight Committee on April 14 to speak about her handling of the Epstein files. "The fact that she has now been run out of office does not mean that she is free of the obligation that every American citizen has to respond to a subpoena and answer questions under oath," says Cole.
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The president is in a precarious political moment seven months before the midterm elections, facing some of his lowest approval ratings and presiding over an unpopular war.
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Last year, the president proposed many steep spending cuts that Congress never granted. This time, he may face an even tougher sell.
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The DOJ concluded that a law requiring presidential records preservation is unconstitutional, setting the path to potentially upend decades-old legal precedent.
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