BREAKING: Trump Fires Pam Bondi… for Not Being Corrupt Enough
The authoritarian president wanted the Attorney General to prosecute his enemies. She tried – and helped cover up the Epstein scandal, too. It wasn’t enough.
Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday for, among other things, failing to put his enemies in jail.
Bondi is the second Cabinet member that Trump has ousted, after he fired former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last month.
In the days leading up to this latest sacking, sources with direct knowledge of the situation told Zeteo that President Trump had been privately trashing Bondi’s job performance behind her back for weeks, if not months. Complaints were multi-faceted, and included griping about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files debacle, which continues to haunt the White House to this day.
However, another recurring grievance of Trump’s, these sources recount, is that he believes she did a “very subpar” job (in the words of a person who speaks to Trump often) leading the Justice Department’s baseless criminal investigations into and prosecutions of his political enemies. In recent months, the president has repeatedly vented to confidants that the Bondi-era DOJ isn’t prosecuting his many foes swiftly or ferociously enough, and that the now-former AG was at risk of letting his political foes, in Trump’s phrasing, “get away with it.”
Sources in and close to the administration also add that Trump has at times fumed that Bondi and the Justice Department have not investigated the 2020 presidential election results as aggressively as he’d like; Trump of course lost that election to Joe Biden but for years has worked to turn his anti-democratic lies and conspiracy theories into Republican dogma.
In other words: one of the key reasons that President Trump is getting rid of Attorney General Bondi – who went all-in on Trump’s cult of personality, and has overseen a Department of Justice that has indeed corruptly gone after Trump’s vindictively selected targets – because she is not corrupt or authoritarian enough.
In typical Trump fashion, he announced Bondi’s ouster on Truth Social while calling her a “Great American Patriot and loyal friend.” He also claimed she will be taking a job in the private sector, and said her deputy, Todd Blanche, will step in as acting attorney general in the interim.
Several outlets have reported, and Zeteo can confirm, that Trump is considering EPA administrator Lee Zeldin for Bondi’s replacement, a staunch Trump ally who as a congressman voted against certifying the election results when Joe Biden won in 2020.
Bondi’s firing comes just 12 days ahead of her scheduled deposition over how the Justice Department has handled the release of its files relating to pedophile and former Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein. The House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Bondi last month to compel her testimony on the matter.
A previous congressional hearing over the Epstein investigation in February devolved into a shouting match when Bondi – who faced the impossible task of defending the indefensible – resorted to insults and bizarre diversions. At one point, she pivoted to the stock market to avoid answering questions about her failures on the investigation and apparent coverup of her boss’s alleged ties to Epstein.
“The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P [is] at almost 7,000 and the Nasdaq [is] smashing records. Americans’ 401k and retirement savings are booming right now,” Bondi said as Epstein survivors seated behind her looked on. “That’s what we should be talking about.”
Her performance on Capitol Hill was just one example of her servitude to Trump, which in the end, was still not enough to stay in his good graces.
At a Cabinet meeting last summer, Bondi lavished completely nonsensical praise on Trump – an enduring theme of her short, rocky tenure as the president’s yes-man in court.
“Mr. President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever … ever,” she said. “Never seen anything like it. Thank you. Your directive to me was very simple: Make America safe. And, despite that, we’ve still been defending over 200 civil lawsuits filed against you.”
Bondi then read some numbers on Trump’s supposed fentanyl seizures, then said, “which saved – are you ready for this media?” She turned to the camera and said “258 million lives” – or about 75% of the nation.
And off-camera, she faced Trump’s scolding push – sometimes publicly – to weaponize the Justice Department to prosecute his perceived enemies.
In a September Truth Social post that read more like a berating text, Trump ordered Pam to hire his former personal lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, as US attorney, and to prosecute high-ranking Democrats that had dared to stand up to him, including New York Attorney General Letitita James, former FBI director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff.
Bondi’s Justice Department did attempt several prosecutions, including of James and Comey but they’ve all failed in court – and Halligan completely embarrassed herself.
No matter how upset Trump was with Bondi’s job performance, numerous Trump officials privately say that the president himself has made it harder for them to charge his political enemies, given how obvious and public he is about ordering up selective and vindictive prosecutions of people who pissed him off.
As AG, Bondi turned the Justice Department’s mission into serving the personal and political interests of the president. A recent ProPublica analysis found that the Justice Department had quietly abandoned over 23,000 criminal cases in just the first six months of Trump’s second term – including hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime and drugs – all to shift resources to his anti-immigration efforts.
Bondi even explicitly instructed employees of the Justice Department to serve the interests of the president, even though the agency is meant to be independent.
“When Department of Justice attorneys, for example, refuse to advance good-faith arguments by declining to appear in court or sign briefs, it undermines the constitutional order and deprives the president of the benefit of his lawyers,” Bondi wrote in a memo dated Feb 5. 2025.
But Bondi’s fierce allegiance to Trump – even over her sworn obligation to the rule of law – still fell short for the Mad King.
Check out more from Zeteo:
Is it just me or did anyone else notice that he's fired 2 women and replaced them with 2 men. If the pattern holds true then his chief of staff is the next to go....
Okay Pam, it's back to the Florida swamp you came from. Too bad Marco Rubio can't join you right now !