Pam Bondi out as attorney general

Published

2026-04-02 12:32

12:32

April 2, 2026

pm

America/Chicago

Pam Bondi is out as attorney general. 

“Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900,” President Donald Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.”

Todd Blanche, Bondi’s deputy, will serve as interim attorney general.

Bondi is the second Cabinet member to be ousted so far in Trump’s second term, and both have been women: former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the face of the administration’s aggressive mass deportation agenda, left her post last month. 

Bondi is a former attorney general of Florida and longtime Trump ally. She was an often aggressive and pugnacious figurehead for Trump’s agenda, leading a department he had long viewed as an adversary and often charged as out to get him. 

Bondi’s tenure upended decades of precedent of the Department of Justice (DOJ) as a politically independent body: Top career prosecutors and FBI agents were fired or quit as the DOJ and FBI sought to prosecute Trump’s political foes and carried out an extraordinary raid of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, where Trump unsuccessfully tried to overturn his election loss. 

But outlets including CNN, The New York Times and Semafor reported this week that Trump was still unhappy with Bondi’s performance in the job and planned to fire her, reportedly considering replacing her with Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Previous coverage ‘This is a new DOJ’: Attorney General Pam Bondi shows allegiance to Trump in first 10 days ‘There is no hoax’: Epstein survivors demand justice and transparency The standoff over the Epstein files — and the new congresswoman caught in the middle

During her confirmation hearings in early 2025, Bondi emphasized her record as a champion for victims of violent crime. In particular, she and her supporters pointed to her prosecutions for domestic abuse and human trafficking during her tenure in Florida.

But it was a trafficking case that put Bondi in a vulnerable position with Trump as well as lawmakers. Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel faced widespread and bipartisan recriminations over the DOJ’s handling of its files connected to Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died awaiting federal sex trafficking charges in 2019.

In early 2025, Bondi declared she had a list of Epstein’s alleged associates and co-conspirators on her desk, but stonewalled its release. 

Then, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers passed a resolution compelling the DOJ to release the Epstein files in an extraordinary rebuke of the White House and congressional leadership, who tried unsuccessfully to quash the effort. The DOJ subsequently released more than 3 million documents and other files from its investigation but faced further criticism from survivors of Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who said the DOJ failed to redact their personal identifying information. 

“This is not about a single person; it is about a government and judicial system that has repeatedly failed Epstein survivors,” Annie Farmer, an Epstein survivor, said in a statement Thursday. “Regardless of who holds power, survivors deserve accountability, transparency, protection from retaliation, and assurance that those who enabled Epstein, Maxwell, and others will be investigated and, if appropriate, prosecuted.”

In February, several Epstein survivors were in the hearing room as members of the House Judiciary Committee grilled a combative Bondi about the department’s handling of the files and redactions. At a news conference earlier that day, survivors and their families excoriated Bondi for what they said was her failure to adequately protect them. 

“Bondi handled the Epstein Files in a terrible manner and seriously undermined President Trump,” GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of the few Republicans who joined Democrats in voting to release the files, said in a statement Thursday. 

The DOJ has also faced setbacks in its highly unusual prosecutions of Trump’s political foes including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James for lying to Congress and mortgage fraud, respectively. A federal judge dismissed both cases in 2025, ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the acting federal prosecutor who brought both cases in Virginia, was illegally appointed to her post. The DOJ is appealing the ruling. 

Jasmine Mithani contributed reporting.

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