Pam Bondi’s removal as U.S. attorney general leaves a central question: whether the next top Justice Department official can succeed any differently in pursuing Trump critics through the criminal court system. An Associated Press report on April 3 said Bondi left the job after prosecutors failed to deliver criminal cases that would stand up to scrutiny, and that her successor will confront many of the same obstacles—skeptical judges, grand juries that refused indictments, and evidentiary and legal hurdles—regardless of the officeholder’s intentions.
The Justice Department’s challenges were described as persistent over the past year, during which it encountered resistance from multiple parts of the process, including judges and grand juries, as well as its own workforce. The AP account said a new attorney general will not only face President Donald Trump’s long-running demand for political prosecutions, but also the “same skeptical court system” and the factual and legal barriers that have repeatedly impeded attempts to reach results.
Former acting attorney general Peter Keisler, speaking to AP by email, argued that Bondi’s departure is not the key variable. Keisler said, “At the end of the day, it’s not like there were some magic steps that Pam Bondi could have taken to make bad cases look good to grand juries or judges.” He added that, in his view, “The problem is that the president is demanding that prosecutions be brought when there’s no evidence and no valid legal theory. A new Attorney General won’t change that.”
AP also placed Bondi in a broader pattern of Trump administration pressure on attorney generals. It said Trump, in his first term, called for Jeff Sessions to investigate then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and ultimately pushed Sessions out after Sessions recused himself from the Russia election interference investigation. The report said Trump berated attorney general William Barr for refusing to support Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 contest, and that Barr resigned soon afterward.
Bondi arrived at the Justice Department roughly 14 months before the April 3 reporting, the AP account said, and it described her as seeking to remain in Trump’s good graces while undertaking investigations into Democrats and Trump’s adversaries—despite concerns from career prosecutors about evidence sufficiency. AP said that early on, after Trump posted on social media in September urging Bondi to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Justice Department pursued those cases and secured indictments in Virginia.
The indictments did not hold. AP reported that a judge dismissed the cases weeks later after finding that the prosecutor who filed them, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally appointed. Since then, AP said grand juries have refused to bring new mortgage fraud charges against James, and it said the Comey case has been mired in evidentiary disputes and statute of limitations concerns. AP added that both Comey and James have denied wrongdoing and called the cases politically motivated.
The AP report described other attempts by prosecutors to build cases against Trump-linked targets that also ran into judicial limits. It said a federal grand jury in Washington refused to return an indictment involving Democratic lawmakers connected to a video in which they urged U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders.” It also said a federal judge quashed Justice Department subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve as part of an investigation into testimony last June by Chair Jerome Powell about a $2.5 billion building renovation.
In the Powell matter, AP reported that Judge James Boasberg said the government produced “essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime” and called the subpoenas’ justifications “thin and unsubstantiated” pretext to force Powell to cut interest rates. AP further said a prosecutor later conceded in court that the investigation had not found evidence of a crime.
Another investigation highlighted in the AP account remained ongoing but has not yet produced charges. AP said prosecutors in Florida were scrutinizing former CIA Director John Brennan over testimony to Congress related to Russian interference in the 2016 election, adding that the investigation has been open for months and that it is unclear whether it will result in charges. Brennan’s lawyers, AP said, have called the investigation baseless.
AP also noted that John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, could face trial in the years ahead, though it said the investigation that produced an indictment and examined Bolton’s handling of classified documents began before Trump took office. For the current leadership, AP said the Justice Department would be led by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has a longstanding relationship with Trump after having served as one of Trump’s personal lawyers.
On what comes next, the AP report said multiple people familiar with the matter told AP on Thursday that Lee Zeldin, a Trump loyalist and head of the Environmental Protection Agency, had been privately mentioned by Trump as a possible pick. Whoever holds the job in the long term, AP quoted Notre Dame law professor Jimmy Gurulé as saying, will almost certainly be expected to carry out Trump’s “retribution campaign” with more success. Gurulé also said Blanche acknowledged that sentiment in a Thursday evening Fox News interview, where Blanche said, “I think the president is frustrated, everybody is frustrated ” and “what we saw happen for the past four years is unforgivable and can never happen again.”