Attorney General Pam Bondi might not have fully appreciated the mess she was creating for herself. On Monday afternoon, during an interview on a conservative podcast, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer drew a distinction between “free speech” and “hate speech,” adding, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
As a legal matter, Bondi’s comments were absurd and drew a swift backlash, even from ostensible allies on the right. The attorney general ultimately tried to walk back her rhetoric, though her retreat wasn’t altogether persuasive.
Complicating matters, however, these weren’t the only problematic comments from the Florida Republican. The New York Times reported on what Bondi went on to say hours after the controversial podcast interview.
In an interview on Fox News’s ‘Hannity’ late Monday, Ms. Bondi suggested that she might direct the Justice Department’s civil rights division to ‘prosecute’ businesses if they turned away customers who wanted to print pictures of Mr. Kirk for memorial vigils, citing the case of an Office Depot employee in Michigan who was fired for rejecting such an order.
“Businesses cannot discriminate,” she told Sean Hannity, saying that she’d already referred the Office Depot case to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“We can prosecute you for that,” she said.
A senior Justice Department official told the Times that the attorney general doesn’t envision a broad campaign against noncompliant businesses, just that she was focused on the Office Depot employee who didn’t want to print Kirk fliers. Just so we’re all clear, this isn’t exactly conservative orthodoxy. When state officials in Colorado sanctioned a baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018, conservatives sided with the baker, arguing that if a private business wants to discriminate on the basis of personal beliefs, it should be able to do so. (Spoiler alert: The high court’s conservative justices agreed.) Bondi, however, apparently believes it’s a federal civil rights violation if an Office Depot employee had personal objections to Kirk and didn’t want to print fliers with his picture. National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, a prominent conservative observer, referenced this while highlighting “Pam Bondi’s ridiculous 24 hours.” Given everything we’ve seen from the attorney general over the course of the year, it’s a shame that this wasn’t an especially unusual day.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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