The attorney general position may be the most impossible in President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
Trump demands things that are not only ethically problematic but also somewhere between highly difficult and impossible. Nobody managed to get the balance right.
Jeff Sessions tried to be the institutionalist and quickly marginalized himself. William Barr then took some politically impressive actions on Trump’s behalf, but was unwilling to go as far as Trump demanded.
Pam Bondi went even further than Barr in bending the Justice Department politically for Trump. But after her , she ended up serving the shortest term of a confirmed attorney general in the last 60 years.
Bondi was, in many ways, destined to fail. But she also clearly made things worse for herself.
And that’s especially true when it comes to two flashpoints between her and Trump: the Epstein files and Trump’s retribution campaign, which has so far been fruitless.
Epstein Files
The most damaging aspect of Bondi’s tenure was undoubtedly the Epstein files.
Trump and his campaign did Pam Bondi no favors by highlighting Trump’s promise to release the Epstein files in 2024.
Then Trump apparently turned against releasing the files in mid-2025, and he went on to fight their release for months before Congress forced him to concede.
This change in position is difficult to communicate to the highly invested public. Bondi managed to make this even worse.
In February, she distributed folders containing the “Epstein Files” to conservative influencers in the White House. However, the folders contained almost no new information. Some of the influencers were disappointed with what amounted to an insubstantial photo.
She also made a series of startling claims about what was contained in the files, in ways that clearly ended up damaging the administration.
When asked about a list of Epstein’s clients, for example, she said it was “on my desk right now,” creating great anticipation. She also claimed there were “tens of thousands of videos” of Epstein “with children or child pornography.”
But when the administration changed direction on transparency promises, it walked back those claims. And, based on what has been released so far, there is still nothing to prove them.
(Bondi later stated that he wasn’t referring specifically to a client list, but rather more of Epstein’s documents more generally.)
In fact, Bondi’s claims would be problematic regardless of what happened to the files. But it raised expectations about something the administration later wanted to play down.
At the end of the Epstein files saga, Bondi was effectively removed from even talking about the files — a task that often fell to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is now temporarily leading the Justice Department. (And it’s worth mentioning that Blanche has her own Epstein-related issues.)
And after an almost comical and overly dramatic testimony in February in which she dodged even Republican questions on the issue, she was met with a call to revisit the topic with the House Oversight Committee later this month.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles summed up the situation well in comments published in December by Vanity Fair. Bondi “completely failed” the Epstein files, Wiles said, and there was apparently no point in pretending otherwise.
Targeting Trump’s enemies
Arguably, Bondi faced even greater obstacles when it came to Trump’s retribution campaign.
While Trump considered efforts to investigate his enemies in his first term, he has made clear in his second term that he wants real investigations, indictments and prosecutions of his perceived political adversaries — especially after being personally indicted four times and convicted in the only case that went to trial.
Perhaps most striking was a later-deleted social media post by Trump from September in which he addressed Bondi by name and urged her to indict former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff of California.
A few days later, Trump forced the firing of a US attorney who resisted, and . About two weeks later, James was also indicted.
But both indictments were based on flimsy evidence — this became a trend, which we’ll talk about next — and the replacement prosecutor was considered illegally appointed. So the cases fell apart.
Except for a more formal indictment against another Trump foe, John Bolton (who had also been investigated by Biden’s Justice Department), no one else has been indicted in the past five and a half months.
But this was not for lack of trying on the part of the Bondi department:
- The DOJ (Department of Justice) has repeatedly failed in its efforts to get grand juries to re-indict Letitia James.
- He also failed to get a grand jury to indict six Democratic members of Congress for their comments encouraging members of the military not to obey illegal orders.
- The DOJ also investigated the third person Trump mentioned in that September post, Adam Schiff.
- An investigation into former CIA director John Brennan has gained momentum recently.
- Trump wrote an executive order demanding investigations into two enemies from his first term, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor.
- Trump publicly called for an investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein, something Bondi quickly agreed to.
- And the DOJ investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, another figure Trump has frequently attacked, has even many Republicans publicly crying out against it.
This last point is revealing.
At a hearing last week, a Justice Department lawyer was forced to make a remarkable admission: the department had no real evidence of criminality against Jerome Powell.
The known evidence in most other cases is similarly incredibly weak.
But Bondi and his department still tried, repeatedly, because Trump demanded it.
This was always something that would end up making her look bad. While Trump gains great political advantage by launching ill-founded conspiracy theories against his enemies, this does not work in a court of law.
If anything, the whole process ended up turning against the administration. Yes, it caused expensive headaches for the targets, but it also made it abundantly clear that there is no equivalence between what Trump was accused of and what he accuses his opponents of doing.
Perhaps it was simply impossible for Bondi to dissuade Trump. But the cases have proved disastrous for Bondi and his department, almost without exception. And apparently they didn’t make Trump happy either.
And, similar to the Epstein files, Bondi’s legacy at the DOJ will include the greatest breakdown of the barrier between the president’s personal politics and the department’s business since at least Watergate.
Whoever succeeds her will inherit this same tension between pleasing Trump and doing what is ethical and viable. Maybe Trump will find someone more adept at navigating this.
But if the past is any prologue, it will be difficult for anyone to solve this enigma.
