David Mastio: Pam Bondi was the best attorney general we're going to get from Trump

David Mastio, The Kansas City Star on Apr 5, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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It was obvious what kind of official U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi would be in the second Trump administration about 12 years before she joined it, long before Donald Trump came down the golden escalator. Bondi took thousands of dollars in Trump campaign donations in 2013 as Florida’s attorney general and then promptly shut down an investigation of Trump University then accused of defrauding dozens of the state’s residents.

Someone with the lowest possible opinion of the former Trump defense counsel wouldn’t have been disappointed once she became Trump’s third Senate-approved Attorney General. She bent and broke the law while abandoning the norm of Department of Justice independence from White House politics. Such abject obsequiousness wasn’t enough for Trump who fired her Thursday after barely more than a year in office.

When Trump wanted the Epstein files splashed across America’s front pages, Bondi promptly promised to release them. When Trump changed his mind after learning of unflattering revelations about himself in the FBI documents, Bondi loyally conspired to hide Trump’s role. Her Justice Department broke the law so obviously that even Republicans on the wildly partisan House Judiciary Committee noticed.

That wasn’t the first time. Her Justice Department broke the law in deporting people despite valid and clear judicial orders not to and lied to dozens of federal judges in the process of pursuing Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

She and Trump violated the law in hand-picking prosecutors to file politically motivated criminal charges against a Democratic New York Attorney General and a Republican former chief of the FBI. Judges promptly slapped that abuse down.

In acting more as Trump’s hit man than the disinterested chief law enforcement officer of the nation, no indignity was too great for her to accept. She literally took orders on her department’s lawbreaking delivered by Trump’s social media messaging app.

Her time at the Justice Department included the purge of any FBI agents and prosecutors who had worked on the prosecution of Trump under the previous Democratic administration, which only took up the cases against the then former president after months of trying very hard to avoid it. Literally thousands of professionals involved along with civil rights, environmental and other professional staffers from politically disfavored departments left. She did not act swiftly to replace them and as a result, prosecutions by the Department of Justice plummeted.

Yes, crime went down under her tenure as Trump observed, but that was only the continuation of the trend under Joe Biden, which Trump denies ever happened.

Trump was frustrated with Bondi because even as she loyally tried to cover up Trump’s involvement with Epstein, facts and documents kept leaking out to the press and Congressional Democrats. She was breaking the law, but not enough for Trump. Trump was also frustrated by Bondi’s failure to find a workaround for the grand juries and judges who kept rejecting Trump’s efforts to take revenge on his enemies from the Biden years. Again, she broke the law in making illegal appointments to carry out the prosecutions, but she wouldn’t override the safeguards in the justice system.

The firing of Bondi is a message to all Trump’s other political appointees, Senate confirmed or not. No amount of bowing to the Dear Leader is enough. No shredding of your principles is enough. No amount of law-breaking is enough. No amount of humiliation is enough to buy you the loyalty of Trump. You must give him everything he wants or you’ll pay the price. Trump is only loyal to himself.

If there is one thing I know after a year of Trump’s administration of justice is that the next attorney general will be worse. That’s what it will read on Bondi’s political headstone: Here lies the career of Donald Trump’s best second-term attorney general.

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David Mastio is a columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.

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