WASHINGTON (AP) — Pam Bondi, Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, insisted at her Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday that the president-elect had been targeted by years of investigations and pledged that she would not “politicize” the Justice Department if confirmed as the country’s chief federal law enforcement officer.
The statements echoed Trump’s claims that the Justice Department had been weaponized against him and came as Democrats express concern that the president-elect will look to use the agency’s law enforcement powers to exact retribution against his adversaries, including the investigators who investigated him.
“They targeted Donald Trump,” Bondi said. “They went after him — actually starting back in 2016, they targeted his campaign. They have launched countless investigations against him.” She added: “If I am attorney general, I will not politicize that office.”
The department, she later said, “had been weaponized for years and years and years, and it’s got to stop.”
The suggestion that the investigations into Trump were politically motivated has been sharply contested by Attorney General Merrick Garland and by special counsel Jack Smith, who in a report released this week said politics played no part in his decisions and that the evidence his team gathered was sufficient for Trump to have been convicted at trial on charges of scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Smith dismissed that case, and a separate one charging Trump with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, after Trump’s election win to comply with longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting criminal cases against a sitting president.
Democrats focused their questions on whether Bondi would be prepared to say “no” to Trump if asked to do something unethical or illegal. She sought to allay those concerns by saying that her only client was the American people, not the president. When asked by Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, what she would do if her career prosecutors recommended bringing a criminal case but the White House said no, she did not answer directly but said: “If I thought that that would happen, I would not be sitting here today.”
Republicans, by contrast, eagerly welcome her as a course correction to a Justice Department they believe has pursued an overly liberal agenda and unfairly pursued Trump through investigations and a special counsel appointment resulting in two indictments.
“If confirmed, I will work to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice — and each of its components,” Bondi said in her opening remarks. “Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end. America must have one tier of justice for all.”
She did not elaborate on what she meant by “one tier of justice.” The Justice Department under outgoing Garland also investigated President Joe Biden over his mishandling of classified information — no charges were filed — and named a special counsel to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter, who was charged with tax and gun crimes before being pardoned in December by his father.
Democrats including Sen. Dick Durbin are expected to seize on Bondi’s yearslong presence in Trump’s orbit and her public defense of him on cable news appearances, including one on Fox News Channel last year in which she said: “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones. … The investigators will be investigated.”
Bondi has also said members of the so-called deep state were “hiding in the shadows” during Trump’s first term “but now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated.”
Such comments have raised alarms that the department under Bondi’s watch could pursue investigations at Trump’s behest. Although longstanding norms dictate that presidents have no hand in individual criminal investigations, Trump was known during his first term to call for specific inquiries into adversaries and berated his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for having recused from an investigation into Russian election interference that ultimately shadowed much of his tenure.
“I need to know that you would tell the president ‘no’ if you’re asked to do something that’s wrong, illegal or unconstitutional,” Durbin, the panel’s top Democrat, told Bondi, noting how she had been his personal lawyer and had echoed his baseless claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the committee, offered a different take, laying out a laundry list of years of grievances against the Justice Department that includes the Russia investigation and more recently a Garland-era memo aimed at targeting threats from parents at school board meetings.
Bondi, a corporate lobbyist who spent 18 years in the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office in Florida, was named to the attorney general position after Trump’s first pick, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration during fallout over a federal sex trafficking investigation that ended without charges.
Bondi is likely to try to keep the focus of Wednesday’s hearing on her own agenda for the department. In her opening statement, she pledged to protect the First Amendment rights of free speech and religion, as well as the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and to reform the beleaguered federal Bureau of Prisons.
“If confirmed as United States Attorney General, my overriding objective would be to return the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe and vigorously enforcing the law,” she will say. “That requires getting back to basics — prosecuting violent crime and gang activity, stopping child predators and drug traffickers, protecting our nation from terrorists and other foreign threats, and addressing the overwhelming crisis at the Border.”
