Pam Bondi is confirmed as attorney general : NPR

Pam Bondi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing to be the next U.S. attorney general on Jan. 15.

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The Senate has voted to confirm Pam Bondi to serve as attorney general, elevating a longtime defender of President Trump to lead the Justice Department and oversee the more than 100,000 who work for it and its component agencies — including the FBI.

Bondi was confirmed Tuesday by a vote of 54 to 46.

She will arrive at the Justice Department after having served as a prosecutor in Tampa, Fla., for almost 20 years, and then the state’s attorney general — a position she held for eight years.

She enters the role of attorney general with deep ties to the president’s orbit. Bondi spoke on Trump’s behalf at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and was later one of his personal attorneys during his first impeachment trial. More recently, she led the legal arm of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank headed by former members of Trump’s first administration.

Before her nomination, Bondi publicly pushed false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, and has said Trump was unfairly prosecuted after leaving office in 2021. Because of this, during her confirmation hearing in January, she was repeatedly pressed by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee about whether she would be able to lead the Justice Department free of influence from the White House.

Bondi pledged to be independent as the nation’s top prosecutor, telling senators that politics would not factor into her decision-making atop the Justice Department.

“Every case will be prosecuted based on the facts and the law that is applied in good faith — period. Politics have got to be taken out of the system,” she said.

Bondi also faced questions about whether she would prosecute the president’s perceived political enemies, including at the Justice Department, given remarks she made on Fox News in 2023.

“The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted. The bad ones,” she said at the time. “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 and they can all be investigated.”

Bondi sought to distance herself from those remarks during her confirmation hearing, emphasizing that the department must act independently. But when asked by Democrats on the committee if she would prosecute figures such as former Special Counsel Jack Smith, former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and former Attorney General Merrick Garland, Bondi said, “I am not going to answer hypotheticals.”

She also said during her hearing that her priorities as attorney general will be gangs, drugs, cartels, the border and foreign adversaries.

“I will fight every day to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice and each of its components,” she said. “The partisanship, the weaponization will be gone. America will have one tier of justice for all.”

Bondi was nominated after Trump’s initial choice, former Fla. Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration and resigned from Congress after facing allegations of sexual misconduct and illegal drug use in a House report. Gaetz has consistently denied any wrongdoing.