Donald Trump had a plan. Just one week after winning a second term, the president-elect announced that Matt Gaetz, a scandal-plagued Republican congressman from Florida, was his choice to serve as the next U.S. attorney general.
That plan didn’t work out well: Gaetz’s bid to lead the Justice Department confronted bipartisan opposition, and it crashed and burned over the course of eight days.
At that point, Trump turned to his second choice: Pam Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general.
There’s no shortage of concerns about Bondi’s prospective nomination, but among the most obvious and most important was the Florida Republican’s role as an election denier who tried to overturn the 2020 election and give Trump illegitimate power.
With this in mind, Bondi must’ve known she’d face a barrage of questions about the 2020 race, and she’s had nearly eight full weeks to prepare a compelling answer for her Senate confirmation hearing. And yet, when Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois broached the subject, Bondi struggled with the obvious line of inquiry. NBC News noted:
Durbin’s first question focused Bondi’s previous efforts to help Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election. ‘President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in, and he is the president of the United States. There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024,’ Bondi said.
Soon after, during the same hearing, Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii also asked the prospective nominee who won the 2020 election. Instead of answering directly, Bondi replied, “Joe Biden is the president of the United States.”
The senator was not pleased. “Ms. Bondi, you know that there is a difference between acknowledging it and — you know, I can say that Donald Trump won the 2024 election. I may not like it, but I can say it. You cannot say who won the 2020 presidential election,” Hirono said, adding, “It’s disturbing that you can’t give voice to that fact.”
Oddly enough, as the hearing got underway, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said at the outset, “We recognize that President Biden won that election.”
Evidently, there’s some question as to who was included in that “we.”
I can come up with a laundry list of reasons Bondi should be nowhere near the attorney general’s office, and I could write a painfully long blog post detailing her unfortunate record as the head of a Trump super PAC, her work as a lobbyist for foreign governments, the bribery allegations she’s faced (allegations she has denied), her failures as a Trump impeachment attorney, her efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act, her willingness to spread false information about the Bidens that was concocted by operatives linked to the Kremlin, and even the fact that she briefly moonlighted as a guest host of a Fox News program while she was supposed to be serving as the Sunshine State’s chief law enforcement official.
But even if those other concerns didn’t exist, in a sensible political environment, Bondi would have disqualified herself in the aftermath of the 2020 election when she championed baseless conspiracy theories, fired some of the first shots in the political war to overturn Trump’s defeat, lied to the public about having uncovered “evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots” and participated in the infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco. In theory, these undemocratic efforts should’ve been career-ending for Bondi. In practice, Trump wants her to be the attorney general despite — or perhaps because of — this record. What’s more, instead of expressing some degree of contrition for her anti-election antics, the Republican lawyer still won’t acknowledge, even now, the legitimacy of the 2020 results. CNN’s Jake Tapper recently asked a GOP senator, “Why would you think somebody who’s willing to lie about the election results in Pennsylvania is going to restore integrity in the Justice Department?” That neither the prospective nominee nor Republican officials in general have an answer to this question tells us a great deal about the merits of Bondi’s upcoming nomination.
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."
Latest Post
Recommended
