By Ashley Parker & Sarah Fitzpatrick
Thursday, April 02, 2026
After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department
of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing
last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were
anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top
official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the
chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with
the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others
leaving the administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, Army Secretary
Daniel Driscoll, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The people, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said that
the timing is uncertain and that President Trump has not yet made up his mind.
But what was once an unofficial motto of the second Trump term—“no scalps”—no
longer applies.
Trump had been reluctant to get rid of any of his top
lieutenants, viewing firings as a concession to the Democrats and the media.
Even in the past few months, there had been an edict that no Cabinet officials
would be removed prior to the midterms, though a series of dismissals were
planned for after Election Day. But the president’s declining support since he
launched the Iran war has changed the political calculus. The odds of
confirming replacements, advisers know, are only growing longer. One person close
to the White House told us that Trump was buoyed by the reaction to his
decision to remove Noem and that it made him more likely to move ahead with
Bondi. (Still, an administration official cautioned that after Noem’s ouster,
optics were a concern; officials worried that getting rid of Bondi would be
viewed as jettisoning only the most “attractive” women, while keeping the men.)
During her 14 months on the job, Bondi tried so hard to
do everything right. She titillated the MAGA base by appearing on Fox News and
promising that the Jeffrey Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right
now,” awaiting her review for release. She relinquished all pretense of leading
an independent Justice Department, going after Trump’s political foes and
enemies, even when other prosecutors might not have brought charges. And to the
president and his allies, she continued to project the perky, kind, warm
Florida persona that had once earned her the girlish
nickname “Pambi.”
Bondi did everything right—or, at least, everything Trump
asked her to do—but in the end, it was not enough. For Trump, and for his
succession of attorneys general, it is almost never enough. In some ways,
Bondi’s official service to Trump seemed preordained to end the way it did,
with a singular moment of crystalline humiliation, after weeks of low-grade
indignities. The case of Jeff Sessions, her distant, first-term predecessor, is
instructive here. In early 2016, Sessions was the first senator to endorse
Trump’s seemingly long-shot presidential campaign, and was rewarded with the
nation’s top law-enforcement job when Trump became president. But after
Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into
possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump viciously turned on his
onetime loyalist, publicly and privately excoriating his attorney general until
finally pushing him out in the middle of his first term.
“No one can succeed in this job,” someone close to the
White House mused to us. “Why would anyone want this job?” Only someone with
“unbridled ambition,” the person concluded, would aspire to be Trump’s attorney
general of the United States.
Bondi was not Sessions. She would not recuse herself; she
would not draw lines; she would not do anything other than loyally serve the
president. Her relationship with Trump went back more than a decade and was far
deeper than his relationship with Sessions. In 2013, the Donald J. Trump
Foundation donated $25,000 to a political group supporting her Florida
attorney-general campaign. (Shortly after, Bondi, in her capacity as the
state’s attorney general, declined to take action against Trump University, despite
multiple complaints—launching the first of several controversies in which the
two would find themselves embroiled.) She remained in his orbit thereafter,
speaking at both his 2016 and 2020 conventions.
Bondi’s trouble as U.S. attorney general, however,
started early, during the first full month of Trump’s second term. It was then
that she—under pressure from Trump’s base to release the Epstein files—summoned
a group of conservative influencers to the White House, handing them thick
white binders labeled, in red, The
Epstein Files: Phase 1. Those close to Bondi acknowledged that her
comments on television that month suggesting that Epstein’s alleged client list
was “sitting on her desk” marked her ownership of the entire debacle and her
failure to adequately protect the president and those close to him who were
friendly with Epstein. There was no client list, the binders contained no new
revelations, and “Bondi must go” murmuring began in earnest.
The stunt further thrust the topic of Epstein—which Trump
hoped to avoid—into the news. But that wasn’t what ultimately cost Bondi her
job. Rather, it was Trump’s perception that she was a weak attorney general,
unable to sufficiently prosecute his perceived enemies. Multiple people
familiar with the president’s thinking said that the failed efforts to
prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James
Comey, among others, were a particular source of anger. Bondi was perceived by
the president as lacking “smarts and guts,” as one person told us.
The Department of Justice declined to answer specific
questions but pointed us to Bondi’s post on X saying that she would “continue
fighting for President Trump and this Administration.” Bondi characterized her
tenure as “highly successful” and declared it “easily the most consequential
first year of the Department of Justice in American history.” Multiple lobbying
firms were trying to hire Bondi this afternoon, as they fielded calls from
corporations and other clients with matters before DOJ.
***
Some Trump allies (and many of his critics) believe that
he asked Bondi for the nearly impossible—to win convictions for seemingly
unwinnable cases—and then blamed her when she earnestly attempted yet still
fell short. But other members of the Cabinet and the administration have
expressed frustration that Bondi’s apparent lack of involvement in the details
of managing the Justice Department resulted in basic mistakes. “They are
sending in idiots” to defend the Trump administration in court without
sufficient experience, one official from another agency told us.
Those sympathetic to Bondi say that she was ordered to
perform legal miracles with a deeply weakened Justice Department. The
president’s demand for absolute loyalty among the department’s rank and file
resulted in a profound loss of institutional expertise and a sharply reduced
talent pool. Multiple prominent Republican attorneys told us that they’d
considered joining the second Trump DOJ. But the requirement to take what they
viewed as an oath of loyalty to the president—not the Constitution—was a step
too far. “The president has a view that he is ultimately the head of the
Justice Department, and the attorney general’s job is to carry out his orders,”
one person close to the White House told us.
Officials in other departments told us that they regarded
the Justice Department’s errors as harmful to the administration’s credibility
with judges; they’d blown up what should have been easy wins for the president.
“This has been festering across the administration for a while,” a second
person close to the administration told us. “It’s the Epstein stuff, partly.
It’s also the critiques of the indictments, like Comey. It’s a general sense of
WTF—she’s not logging a lot of wins, not clocking a lot of good media.”
Bondi also enthusiastically enabled one of the
president’s most fervently held beliefs: that the 2020 election had been
“rigged.” Bondi directed multiple U.S. attorneys to pursue wide-ranging probes
into election “interference” and “irregularities,” and her department has
pursued lawsuits in 30 jurisdictions to obtain unredacted voter information
that Trump’s legal critics believe are an effort to prevent significant numbers
of Americans from voting in future elections. In perhaps a last-minute attempt to
save her job, Bondi announced on X on Tuesday that she was elevating yet
another U.S. attorney to “play a key role in ensuring the integrity of American
elections.”
***
When Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee
in February, she came prepared with well-honed, pre-written insults for the
Democratic lawmakers, in the hope that her fiery attacks would appeal to the
only audience that mattered: Trump. But even that approach backfired; she was
widely mocked for a non sequitur—“The Dow is over 50,000 right now!”—as well as
for her pages of scripted invective. (It turns out that in Trump’s eyes, burns
are cool, burn books less so.)
Now the defining image of Bondi’s tenure may be her
testimony on Capitol Hill, specifically the image of her refusing to look at
Epstein victims seated in the rows behind her, even when asked to multiple
times by members of Congress. Weeks later—almost exactly a year after the
initial Epstein flare-up—the buzz at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, where
Bondi is a frequent presence, was that Trump was looking to get rid of her and
hoping to have a replacement confirmed by the November midterms. Multiple people
at the Justice Department and close to the White House familiar with Bondi’s
tribulations told us that she has come close to being fired multiple times
previously, including in the past few months. One thing that extended Bondi’s
tenure, several people said, was her warm personal relationship with Trump and
with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who both genuinely like her. “Pam
and I have been friends for more than 15 years, and I think she’s one of the
finest people I know,” Wiles told us in a brief phone call.
In response to our questions, the White House
spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in an email that “Trump has the most talented
cabinet and team in American history. Patriots like Kash Patel, Lori
Chavez-DeRemer, and Dan Driscoll are tirelessly implementing the President’s
agenda and achieving tremendous results for the American people.”
Despite the attorney-general role being among the most
thankless in the Trump administration, there is no shortage of people eager to
replace Bondi. Sensing the attorney general’s weakness, Alina Habba, Trump’s
former personal lawyer, and Jeanine Pirro, a television judge who is now
Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, have been jockeying for the
job, both directly to Trump and to his allies at Mar-a-Lago. So, too, have EPA
Administrator Lee Zeldin and Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah.
Yet the two people close to the White House, as well as a
top White House official, told us that Todd Blanche, the Bondi deputy who has
now been elevated to acting attorney general, has long coveted the top job and
will attempt to transform his interim role into something more permanent. “I
think Todd will distinguish himself,” the White House official said, speaking
anonymously to share internal thinking. “It’s sort of a trial for him.”
Tales of Bondi’s demise had been brewing since almost the
beginning, and we asked the White House official: Why now? Why today? They
responded that there was no particular “rhyme or reason” but that Bondi and
Trump had “been talking back and forth for some time.”
“Ultimately, he was talked out,” this person explained,
“and she was talked out.”
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