- President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi after continued fallout over her handling of the DOJ’s files about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
- Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as acting attorney general.
- Trump is eyeing EPA chief Lee Zeldin to replace Bond as head of the DOJ.
President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday.
Bondi’s dismissal comes after reports that Trump was increasingly unhappy about her handling of Department of Justice files about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the DOJ’s failure to successfully prosecute several of the president’s political enemies.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as acting attorney general, said Trump, who, in a social media post, called his former criminal defense lawyer Blanche a “very talented and respected Legal Mind.”
Trump is reportedly considering Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, as a permanent replacement for Bondi.
“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900,” the president wrote.
“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future,” Trump said.
Bondi, in a statement on X, said, “Over the next month I will be working tirelessly to transition the office of Attorney General to the amazing Todd Blanche before moving to an important private sector role I am thrilled about, and where I will continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration.”
Her ouster comes weeks after Trump terminated another cabinet member, Kristi Noem, as Department of Homeland Security secretary.
Noem was dismissed after backlash over DHS’ aggressive immigration enforcement in Minnesota, which led to the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens by federal agents. Noem was replaced by Markwayne Mullin, who, until recently, was a U.S. senator representing Oklahoma.
“The sands of her hourglass are about to run out,” one source told MS NOW earlier Thursday, noting that Trump in recent days has been talking to Republicans and allies about removing Bondi.
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican whose bill mandating that the DOJ release all files related to Epstein became law in late 2025, said in an X post, “I support Trump firing Pam Bondi. Do you?”
“I hope the next AG will release all the Epstein files according to the law and follow up with investigations, prosecutions, and arrests,” Massie said.
Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, in a post earlier Thursday on X said, “If the reports that Lee Zeldin will be replacing Pam Bondi as Attorney General are true — I welcome it.”
“Bondi handled the Epstein Files in a terrible manner and made this situation far worse than it had to be for President Trump,” Mace wrote. “I look forward to a new Attorney General.”
Trump, in his second term, has been much more conservative in firing high-level officials than during his first term, which was marked by a series of abrupt terminations, including that of his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
Trump fired Sessions in late 2018 after the then-attorney general recused himself from overseeing a DOJ investigation of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign’s contacts with Russians, which led to the DOJ’s appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to handle that probe.
Epstein files fallout
Bondi is widely seen as having bungled the release of files related to Epstein, who years ago had been a friend of Trump’s.
Bondi, after Trump regained the White House last year, initially promised to release DOJ documents about Epstein, whose criminal activities have been of keen interest to the president’s MAGA political base.
She later reneged on that promise after making a show of giving social media influencers friendly to Trump binders of documents that turned out to include information about Epstein that was previously publicly available.
Congress later overwhelmingly passed Massie’s bill mandating that the DOJ release all of its files about Epstein by Dec. 19, which Trump begrudgingly signed after opposing the effort for months.
Although the DOJ did release many documents by that date, it failed to release millions more until weeks later, and even then withheld numerous documents.
On March 17, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena to Bondi, compelling her to sit for a deposition about the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files on April 14.
Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat who is the Oversight panel’s ranking member, in a post on X on Thursday, wrote, “Pam Bondi and Donald Trump may think her firing gets her out of testifying to the Oversight Committee.”
“They are wrong — and we look forward to hearing from her under oath,” Garcia said.
Comey and James criminal cases
On Nov. 24, Bondi and the DOJ were embarrassed by the dismissal of federal criminal prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump had pushed Bondi to criminally charge Comey and James, who are enemies of his.
Comey was charged with making a false statement and obstruction stemming from his testimony to Congress years earlier. James was charged with bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution in connection with a mortgage she obtained to buy a home in 2020.
Both of them denied any wrongdoing and said the prosecutions were politically motivated.
A federal judge tossed out the cases against both after finding that Lindsey Halligan, then the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who had obtained the indictments against Comey and James, had been invalidly appointed.
Halligan is one of several top federal prosecutors whose appointments during the second Trump administration have been deemed invalid.
House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., in a statement on Thursday, said, “Pam Bondi’s tenure as the most corrupt Attorney General in modern American history has been a disgraceful affront to our Constitution.”
“The so-called Attorney General and the pathetic, sycophantic political hacks installed with her have repeatedly weaponized the Department of Justice and taxpayer dollars to target political opponents of Donald Trump, trample the rights of law-abiding Americans and silence and attempt to intimidate those who disagree with this administration,” Jeffries said.
“Pam Bondi has lied to Congress and to the American people. Under her tenure, the Department has lost centuries of professional experience, willfully violated federal law and judicial orders alike, while at the same time, hiding millions of documents linked to the Epstein files in a massive cover-up.”
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