Washington — Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who represented President-elect Donald Trump during his first impeachment, is appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday as she seeks confirmation to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
“America must have one tier of justice for all,” Bondi will say in her opening statement, obtained by CBS News. Bondi plans to tell the committee that the “partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end” with her at the helm.
Trump selected Bondi to be his nominee for U.S. attorney general after his first pick, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration. Bondi made history in 2010 when she became the first woman to serve as Florida’s attorney general, a role she held for two terms.
A close ally of the president-elect, Bondi was quick to endorse Trump in his first run for the White House in 2016 and was one of Florida’s first elected officials to do so.
Bondi’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is one of several taking place before GOP-led panels this week as Trump prepares to begin his second term in office. Amid those picks fielding questions from senators ahead of Monday’s inauguration are Pete Hegseth, Trump’s intended nominee for defense secretary; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is under consideration for secretary of state; and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who Trump selected to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
Republicans have indicated they plan to give substantial deference to Trump as he fills out the top ranks of his administration and are aiming to install key Cabinet officials to their posts soon after the president-elect is inaugurated Monday.
Bondi’s nomination
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Bondi spent the weeks leading up to her confirmation hearing meeting with senators on Capitol Hill, and she is not expected to face significant hurdles to confirmation by the Republican-led Senate. Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley sat down with Bondi in early December and called her a “well-qualified nominee with an impressive legal career.”
Still, Democrats are likely to probe Bondi on concerns that Trump will weaponize the Justice Department to target his political enemies, including President Biden, former special counsel Jack Smith and members of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
She is also expected to be questioned about her view of the role of attorney general and the independence of the Justice Department.
Ahead of the hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, accused Trump of using the Justice Department as his personal law firm and said he is concerned Bondi will prioritize fealty to Trump over loyalty to the Constitution. He met with Bondi last week.
“The obvious concern with Ms. Bondi is whether she will follow the bipartisan tradition of the post-Watergate era and oversee an independent Department of Justice that upholds the rule of law,” Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said Monday in a Senate floor speech.
She may also face scrutiny from Democrats over her lack of federal experience and her work lobbying for foreign nations after leaving state government. The attorney general candidate is a partner at Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm that also employed Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff.
Bondi was term-limited in her position as Florida’s attorney general and left office in 2019. While in office, she spearheaded lawsuits against the Obama administration, challenging the Affordable Care Act — known as Obamacare — and then-President Barack Obama’s immigration policies.
She went on to serve as an attorney and lobbyist at Ballard Partners. There, she represented large corporations like General Motors, Amazon, Uber, and the American Institute Against Human Trafficking, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks lobbying. And she submitted a registration with the federal government to lobby on behalf of Qatar “regarding Qatari relations with U.S. government officials, U.S. business entities, and non-governmental audiences, in dealing with matters pertaining to combating human trafficking.”
During Trump’s first term, Bondi briefly left her lobbying position to serve as a member of his defense team during the first set of impeachment proceedings pursued by congressional Democrats. She defended Trump’s July 2019 call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and said the then-president had a basis to raise concerns about the Bidens, Ukraine and the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s son, served on the board of Burisma.
During the 2019 call, Trump pressured Zelenskyy to investigate Mr. Biden, then his main rival for the presidency, and his son. Democratic lawmakers launched investigative proceedings to determine whether Trump conditioned security assistance to Ukraine on the public announcement of an investigation.
The Democratic-led House voted to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstructing a congressional investigation, making him just the third U.S. president to ever be impeached. The Republican-led Senate then acquitted him following a trial, where Bondi was part of the team representing Trump.
In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, she spearheaded legal efforts to challenge the results in Pennsylvania and pushed the false claim that Trump won the state.
Bondi was also among the Trump allies who traveled to New York and spoke out in defense of the president-elect early last year during his “hush money” criminal trial. A jury convicted Trump on 34 state felony counts of falsifying business records in May and he was sentenced last week.
After the Justice Department brought criminal charges against Trump in 2023, Bondi told Fox News, “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated because the deep state last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight on them.”
If confirmed, she will now lead that department and will have the power to look into various aspects of the investigations into Trump that were led by Smith. She will also oversee the numerous law enforcement components under the Justice Department, including the FBI and the ATF, two organizations that have been targets of the president-elect and his allies.
Bondi will also oversee implementation of aspects of Trump’s agency and lead the department that will defend the president-elect’s actions in federal court.
contributed to this report.
