Battle Brewing To Replace Bondi
The girls are fighting.
The former Attorney General’s picture is barely cold in the trashcan, and already her would-be replacements are jockeying to be the next lawyer to land headfirst in the rubbish, with only a pile of congressional subpoenas to cushion the blow.
Jeanine! Alina! Harmeet! The gang’s all here.
This job is objectively a shit sandwich. An increasingly demented and desperate president is staring down the likely loss of at least one House of Congress in the midterms and a wildly unpopular war that refuses to end no matter how much he shitposts at it. The one thing Trump wants from the DOJ is the scalps of his enemies — a prize that moves ever further out of reach as statutes of limitations run.
The problem isn’t that Pam Bondi lacked “smarts and guts,” as Trump reportedly complained. The former county prosecutor and Florida state AG worked like hell to give her boss the perp walks he demanded. The problem is that the American legal system, battered as it is, retains a stubborn capacity to distinguish between actual crimes and the president's personal grievances.
Darn you, grand juries! Darn you, federal judges! Darn you, probable cause!
This is a problem familiar to Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s second choice to lead the US Attorneys Office in DC. After Ed Martin failed to win Senate confirmation, Trump tapped the former Fox News host for the job. Pirro was a former state prosecutor in New York, but her chops are a little rusty. She’s gotten no-billed dozens of times by grand juries, suffered an embarrassing string of losses related to DHS’s “surge” into DC, and her subpoena for the Federal Reserve got quashed by Chief Judge James Boasberg, who found that the DOJ’s “justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual.”
For the case against lawmakers who posted a video reminding service members of their obligation to disregard illegal orders, Pirro brought in a ringer — a retired state prosecutor currently working as a dance photographer. But his presentation fell flat, and not a single grand juror voted to indict.
The Atlantic reports that Pirro is undeterred, and is actively lobbying for the job at Mar-a-Lago. She’s joined by Trump’s sparklemagic lawyer, Alina Habba, who recently relocated to Florida to be closer to the action. The former dress-up US Attorney for New Jersey is theoretically a senior Justice Department official advising on US Attorneys Offices. She’s never prosecuted a federal case in her life, but Caligula made his horse a consul so … sure, why not?
Other reported contenders include EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who practiced law for three whole years in Long Island before being elected to the New York State Senate. Trump has referred to Zeldin as his “secret weapon,” thanks to Zeldin’s uncanny ability to pump out expedited permits for hydrocarbon extraction, which is just like running the world’s largest law firm.
CBS reports that Harmeet Dhillon, another of Trump’s personal lawyers, is in the mix, too. Dhillon presided over the evisceration of the DOJ’s Civil Division, reorienting the office to hunt trans kids and protect white men from academic and workplace “discrimination.” But unlike Bondi, who understood that social media is just a tool for pumping out content to keep sweet with the White House, Dhillon isn’t in on the joke. She actually boasted once to the Wall Street Journal that she wakes up and scrolls X.com for “a list of new horrors,” after which “I text my deputies, and we assign cases, and we get cranking.” She could turn the DOJ into an anti-DEI machine without blinking. (Because she never blinks.)
Senators Mike Lee and Eric Schmitt are mentioned as possible candidates as well, but the real man to beat is Deputy AG Todd Blanche, yet another of Trump’s former personal lawyers. In the post announcing that Bondi would be relocated to a farm upstate where she could run around and chase squirrels with the other discarded former lawyers — say hi to Rudy! — Trump said “our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General.”
Graded on the Trump curve, Blanche is comparatively qualified: He worked as a prosecutor at SDNY early in his career. He has actual experience in Justice Department leadership. He’s not obviously delusional.
But if Blanche wasn’t able to make those political prosecutions happen as the second-in-command at DOJ, why would he be able to do it from the big chair?
He’s also got some stink on him from the Epstein files, another grenade Bondi tried and failed to diffuse for the president. Blanche interviewed Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in person, right around the time she found herself transferred from Florida to a cushy facility in Texas that categorically bars sex offenders. It was at this meeting that Maxwell remembered that Trump was always a perfect gentleman when she knew him — an amazing coincidence Blanche will certainly be asked about in a congressional hearing if he takes the top job. Will he be reduced to screeching about the stock market when asked about his boss’s former buddy?
There is one more potential wrench in the works. Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who doomed Ed Martin’s nomination by making sure he never got out of the Judiciary Committee, says he’s a “no” on anyone who downplays the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
“For me, the threshold for somebody following Pam Bondi ends the moment I hear they said one thing that excused the events of January the 6th. I’ve been very clear on that,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “So I hope whoever they have in mind to follow General Bondi is very clear-eyed on my position on Jan. 6.”
So … none of the above?
Whoever succeeds Bondi will preside over an institution that’s been gutted during her 14-month tenure. More than 6,400 employees were either fired, resigned, or took early retirement. The Civil Rights Division lost roughly three-quarters of its attorneys. The share of top law school graduates applying to work at DOJ has plummeted, and US Attorneys are reduced to asking anyone with a MAGA hat and a bar card to slide into their DMs. Worst of all, judicial deference to the government is decimated, thanks to the terrible, mendacious arguments Bondi forced her employees to make during the past 14 months.
“I won’t believe it until you testify. That’s what has happened to the credibility of your office,” New Jersey Judge Zahid Quraishi excoriated a hapless AUSA in March. “Generations of Assistant U.S. Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy it within a year.”
None of that will change for whichever lickspittle slobbers his or her way to the top of Main Justice. Bondi’s successor may be a better manager, or have a clearer understanding of how federal prosecutions work. But he or she won’t be able to magic up crimes by Trump’s enemies where none exist.
The only thing different is the name on the next portrait to wind up in the trash.
“The girls are fighting” ??? I thought it would be about the incompetent males in federal government, but no it’s a “cat fight” between incompetent females.
offensive phrasing.