Trump fires Attorney General Pam Bondi: Reports
Trump in recent days has been talking to Republicans about removing Bondi from her position.
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U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks as she participates alongside U.S. President Donald Trump in a roundtable discussion with the Fraternal Order of Police at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 5, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
President Donald Trump has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi from her position, MS Now and other news outlets reported on Thursday.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has been tapped as acting interim attorney general, MS Now reported.
Trump is reportedly considering Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, as a replacement for Bondi.
Bondi's dismissal comes after reports that Trump was increasingly unhappy about her handling of Department of Justice files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the DOJ's failure to successfully prosecute several of the president's political enemies.
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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin makes a water policy announcement and holds a signing ceremony with members of the West Virginia Congressional Delegation at the EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 18, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, in a post 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 May 2017 after the then-attorney general recused himself from overseeing a DOJ investigation of his 2016 presidential campaign's contacts with Russians, which led to the DOJ's appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to handle that probe.
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 a law mandating that the DOJ release all of its files about Epstein by Dec. 19. 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.
Months earlier, on Nov. 24, Bondi and the DOJ were embarrassed by the dismissal of two 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, the then-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.
