WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, will face questions on Capitol Hill Wednesday about her loyalty to the Republican president-elect, who has vowed to operate the agency to take aim at his alleged vendetta to avenge political enemies.
The former Florida attorney general and corporate lobbyist would be one of the most scrutinized members of Trump’s Cabinet if confirmed to head the department that prosecuted the once-and-future president in two separate criminal cases that never went to trial.
Here’s what you should know about Bondi ahead of her confirmation hearing:
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She is a close ally and long-time defender of Trump
Bondi has been a fixture in Trump’s orbit for years and a regular defender of the president-elect on news shows amid his legal troubles. Given her public statements criticizing the criminal cases against Trump, she is likely to face many questions given his threats to seek retaliation against those he believes have wronged him.
“The Justice Department and the prosecutors will prosecute — the bad guys,” Bondi said in an appearance on Fox News in 2023. “The investigators will investigate.”
Bondi said members of the so-called deep state “hid in the shadows” during Trump’s first term, “but now they are in the spotlight and they can all be investigated.”
Bondi traveled to New York last May to support Trump in court as he stood trial in his hush-money criminal case. Trump received no punishment in the case last week after being convicted by a jury on 34 counts.
Following Trump’s guilty verdict in the case, Bondi said in another appearance on Fox News – alongside Trump’s pick for FBI Director Kash Patel – that “there is a tremendous loss of trust in the justice system tonight.” She added: “The American people see through it.”
On a radio show last August, she compared special counsel Jack Smith to “a rabid dog” after he filed a novel charge of election interference in the 2020 election against Trump in the wake of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Smith abandoned that case — and the separate secret documents case — after Trump’s victory in November, citing the Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting sitting presidents.
Florida’s first female attorney general
Bondi was first elected Florida attorney general in 2010, defeating Democratic Senator Dan Gelber after receiving the endorsement of former Republican governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
As Florida’s attorney general, Bondi led a lawsuit brought by more than two dozen states against President Barack Obama’s health care reforms. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the health care law. Bondi also fought to uphold Florida’s ban on same-sex marriage – arguing that marriage should be determined by each state.
One of her top priorities as attorney general has been to combat so-called pill mills, or clinics, that dispense enormous quantities of prescription painkillers and facilitate fuel the country’s opioid crisis.
Bondi faced an ethics investigation after she personally solicited a political donation from Trump in 2013 while her office was considering whether to join New York in suing Trump University over fraud allegations.
Trump wrote a $25,000 check from his family’s charitable foundation to a political committee supporting Bondi, violating the law’s ban on charities supporting partisan political activities. After the check was received, Bondi’s office declined to sue Trump’s company for fraud, saying there were insufficient grounds to proceed.
Both Trump and Bondi denied wrongdoing, the state’s ethics commission dismissed the complaints and a prosecutor hired by then-Republican Gov. Rick Scott concluded there was insufficient evidence to support the bribery allegations surrounding the donation.
Before becoming Florida’s attorney general, Bondi spent 18 years in the Hillsborough County district attorney’s office, prosecuting cases “ranging from domestic violence to capital murder,” according to her bio at Ballard Partners, the lobbying firm she joined in 2019. One of the cases she handled was the 2006 prosecution of baseball star Dwight Gooden, who was sent to prison for violating his probation by consuming cocaine.
She spent years lobbying for companies like Amazon
Democrats are likely to press Bondi on her years as a lobbyist and the potential conflicts of interest her work poses for companies and other organizations that could be subject to Justice Department scrutiny.
Records show that between 2019 and 2024, Bondi was registered to represent 30 clients, including companies like Uber and Amazon, during her time at Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm led by Brian Ballard, who has ties to Trump, according to the advocacy group PublicCitizen.
According to her Ballard Partners bio, she led Ballard Partners’ corporate compliance practice, which focuses on helping Fortune 500 companies “implement best practices that proactively address public policy challenges such as human trafficking, opioid abuse and data protection.” tackle”.
She has registered as a foreign agent for the government of Qatar for work related to anti-human trafficking in the lead-up to the World Cup in 2022. She also represented KGL Investment Company KSCC, a Kuwaiti company also known as KGLI. The company paid Ballard $300,000 in 2019 to lobby the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department and Congress on immigration policy, human rights and economic sanctions.
Beyond her advocacy work, she also served as chair of the Center for Litigation and co-chair of the Center for Law and Justice at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by former Trump administration staffers to lay the groundwork for its potential to lay second term. Her duties in this role included filing a brief with the Supreme Court in support of a public high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field after games.
She was part of Trump’s first defense team in the impeachment trial
Bondi stepped down from lobbying in 2020 to defend Trump during his first impeachment trial against allegations that Trump abused the power of his office when he pressured the Ukrainian president during a phone call to investigate then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden to advance the 2020 election.
Trump, who denied any wrongdoing, was impeached in the U.S. House of Representatives and acquitted in the U.S. Senate.
Bondi was hired to strengthen White House messaging and communications. From the beginning, Trump and his allies tried to delegitimize the impeachment, dismissing the whole thing as a farce.
Bondi supported Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election results
Bondi supported Trump’s efforts to challenge his 2020 loss to Biden by traveling to Pennsylvania in the days after the election, where she claimed the campaign had evidence of “fraud.”
Bondi appeared at a press conference in Philadelphia the day after the 2020 election alongside then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The former New York City mayor has since lost his law license in New York and Washington, D.C., after he investigated false claims by Trump about his election loss.
At the news conference, Giuliani suggested that fraudulent ballots could be pouring in from “Mars” or nearby Camden, New Jersey – or, as he said, “Joe Biden would have voted 50 times, or 5,000 times, for all we know.” Bondi said poll workers in Philadelphia were holding Republican poll watchers too far back and preventing them from doing their jobs.
“We won Pennsylvania and we want every vote to be counted fairly,” Bondi said.
The next day, during an appearance on Fox & Friends, Bondi said there was “evidence of fraud.”
“We’re not going anywhere until they declare we won Pennsylvania,” Bondi said, claiming there were “fake ballots that came in late.” But when the moderator pressed her again about those “fake ballots,” she replied, ” “It could be.” – that’s the problem…We don’t know.”
Bondi further claimed that the ballots had been “thrown away” and that “people received ballots that were dead.”
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
