There were quite a few reasons to see Attorney General Pam Bondi’s nomination as highly controversial. For example, the Florida Republican is an election denier who was directly involved in an effort to overturn the 2020 election and give Donald Trump illegitimate power.
There’s also the bribery allegations she has faced (Bondi has long denied any wrongdoing), her failures as a Trump impeachment attorney, her efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act and her willingness to spread false information about the Bidens that was concocted by operatives linked to the Kremlin.
But there’s something else from Bondi’s résumé that set her apart from every other attorney general nominee in American history: The Republican lawyer worked as a lobbyist for foreign governments. In fact, the nation’s chief law enforcement official, as recently as 2020, was a registered foreign agent who was responsible for “personally and substantially” engaging in delivering services for the government of Qatar, according to a consulting agreement filed with the Justice Department.
Ordinarily, this isn’t the sort of background one expects to find on a U.S. attorney general’s résumé. Senate Republicans, however, didn’t much care and confirmed Bondi anyway.
On Wednesday, Bondi took the oath in the Oval Office — with Trump nearby, looking over her shoulder. Hours later, as NBC News reported, the former foreign agent shuttered her country’s Foreign Influence Task Force.
In a little-noticed directive on her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a halt to a years-old federal law enforcement effort to combat secret influence campaigns by China, Russia and other adversaries that try to curry favor and sow chaos in American politics. Buried on the fourth page of one of 14 policy memos Bondi issued Wednesday, the order disbands the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and pares back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite years of warnings by U.S. intelligence agencies that foreign malign influence operations involving disinformation were a growing and dangerous threat.
This task force was established in 2017 — by Trump’s first handpicked FBI director, Chris Wray, before he fell out of favor — in response to several foreign influence operations.
Those efforts did not go away. On the contrary, throughout 2024, officials from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that foreign adversaries were targeting the United States’ elections. (Russia, they added, was “the most active threat.”) But in the opening weeks of Trump’s second term, his handpicked attorney general nevertheless decided that it’d be a good idea to close the FBI office focused on combating foreign influence campaigns. Frank Figliuzzi, former head of FBI counterintelligence and an NBC News contributor, called the developments “astounding,” adding: “It’s now a free-for-all for foreign intel services seeking influence.” It’s going to be a long four years.
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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