AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has fired Pam Bondi as the U.S. attorney general amidst reports of his growing frustration with Bondi’s failure to prosecute his political enemies and her handling of the Epstein files. Trump said Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as acting U.S. attorney general. Blanche was President Trump’s private attorney. Lee Zeldin, who currently heads the Environmental Protection Agency, is reportedly a top contender to replace Bondi. Blanche becomes Trump’s 10th attorney general, confirmed or acting, since he first took office in 2017, more than any other president in history. Bondi is the second high-profile Cabinet member to be fired by Trump in recent weeks, after former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was ousted in March.

Bondi was a Trump loyalist who openly heaped praise on the president and did away with the long-standing DOJ practice to maintain political independence from the White House. Bondi oversaw failed prosecutions of Trump’s perceived political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, and initiated DOJ investigations into others, including the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell. Under her watch, thousands of career attorneys were pushed out or left the Department of Justice. The Civil Rights Division and the section that prosecutes public corruption were hollowed out. And Bondi oversaw the effort to obtain sensitive voter data from the states.

Her firing comes just months after a heated congressional hearing in which she refused to apologize to Epstein survivors for the DOJ’s failure to fully redact their names in released documents. California Congressmember Robert Garcia said in a statement, quote, “She will not escape accountability and remains legally obligated to appear before our committee under oath,” referring to a House Oversight Committee subpoena issued against Bondi last month.

To talk about Pam Bondi’s tenure at the DOJ and more, we go to Washington, D.C., to speak to David Cole, professor of law and public policy at the Georgetown University Law Center and former national legal director of the ACLU.

David, thanks so much for joining us. It is the front-page, across-the-paper headline, except for one column, of The New York Times, “Trump Fires Bondi After Bumpy Tenure.” Can you talk about her legacy at the Justice Department, what Pam Bondi represented, what she failed to do for President Trump and for the nation?

DAVID COLE: So, I think she’ll go down in history as one of the worst attorneys general we’ve ever had. And that’s because she basically turned the Justice Department on its head. The Justice Department is supposed to be independent of the president. And the reason for that is that they’re the folks who can take a U.S. citizen or any other person living in this country and lock them up. They’re the people who can prosecute you. They’re the people who can seek the death penalty. And so, when you have a government agency that has that kind of power, it’s critical that it be acting in the name of the law and in the name of justice, and not in the name of partisan politics and doing the master’s bidding.

She came in and did the master’s bidding, and she did it poorly. She prosecuted his enemies, and those prosecutions have failed, sometimes because judges have thrown them out, other times because grand juries of American citizens have said, “There’s nothing here.” Her effort to prosecute members of Congress for simply informing members of the military that they have a duty not to follow illegal orders was rejected by a grand jury of citizens.

As you said, she ran out thousands of people from the Justice Department. It is a decimated department. She oversaw legal opinions that authorized the summary execution of people alleged to be bringing drugs into this country by boat. She oversaw Justice Department lawyers who federal courts across this country have accused of lying to the courts, of engaging in contemptuous conduct, of slow-walking and obstructing orders of courts.

She decimated the Civil Rights Division, lifting consent decrees that were designed to protect us, the people of America, from police abuse, and botched in every way possible the Epstein — the disclosure of the Epstein files, saying she has a client list on her desk, never turned over; turning over files of, binders that she says, or the Epstein files, there was nothing new there; and then, when compelled by Congress to turn over the files, failing to redact the names of victims and redacting the names of perpetrators.

I mean, she has been really an embarrassment to the nation, an embarrassment to the department. But I think the blame, really — you know, the blame rests with her, because when you’re in that role, you are supposed to be able to say no to the president. That is a critical role of the attorney general. She was never able to say no to the president. But a lot of the things she did, you know, you can blame her, but the ultimate blame goes to the president of the United States. It’s he who was pressing for the prosecution of people like Comey and — James Comey and Letitia James merely because they were his opponents. It’s he who is urging them to engage in bogus grand jury investigations that are trying to set up ways to undermine the midterms. It is he who ordered them to stop the prosecution of Mayor — New York Mayor Eric Adams for corruption. So, I blame the both of them equally. And I don’t think it’s going to get any better with anyone who follows in her footsteps.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, we can’t hear you. Juan’s asking question. Go ahead.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes. David, you mentioned the Epstein files. I wanted to ask you about this whole issue of the subpoena that was issued to Pam Bondi to appear before the House Oversight Committee on April 14th. Nancy Mace, the Republican from South Carolina, who forced a vote on that subpoena, told Axios, quote, “My subpoena still stands … I did it by name, not as the sitting Attorney General.” What’s your sense of whether this will actually occur and her being brought before the committee even after she’s been fired?

DAVID COLE: Well, the committees can call anybody they want before them to testify, and the fact that she has now been run out of office does not mean that she is free of the obligation that every American citizen has to respond to a subpoena and answer questions under oath. So, no, if the committee chooses to demand that she come before them, the fact that she is no longer the attorney general does not protect her.

They may also — if they’re interested in what the Justice Department is going to do in the future, then she’s not going to be very helpful. But if they’re interested in what were the decisions she made that led to so much distrust of the department, to get to the bottom of that, she’s the right person to be forced to answer those questions.

AMY GOODMAN: David, I just have a quick question on this issue. Is it possible that Trump fired her now because that would mean she would no longer have access to the documents at the Justice Department and that he specifically is concerned about this?

DAVID COLE: You know, I don’t know. I mean, it’s hard to know. There’s lots of things he could be concerned about. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s concerned about the Epstein files. He should be concerned about the Epstein files. It’s one of the things that Republicans and his base are concerned about that he is doing, and so — that he’s potentially implicated in. So, it’s possible, but it’s not a tactic that would, in fact, protect any of the information in the Justice Department from the purview of the committee. They can call before them, you know, Todd Blanche if they want to. They can call Pam Bondi if they want to. They can subpoena whatever documents they want to. So, you know, I don’t think he’s going to be able to obfuscate with respect to the Epstein investigation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David, I wanted to ask you about — 

DAVID COLE: He’ll try, but I don’t think he’ll succeed.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: David, I wanted to ask you about another aspect of Pam Bondi’s legacy: her efforts to seize state voter data. In May of 2025, the DOJ began sending letters to nearly 40 states demanding sensitive information, including driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers of every registered voter. Twelve states have complied. But what’s your sense of this aspect of her work at Justice?

DAVID COLE: Well, this is another example of the politicization of justice. They are using the Justice Department, both with respect to these demands and with respect to the investigations in Georgia of the 2020 election, to try to depress voter turnout during the midterms, because they know they’re not going to go well for them, and to set the groundwork for potentially trying to intervene in one way or another.

The Justice Department is supposed to, above all, protect our rights, including, most importantly in a democracy, the right to vote. And what you see this Justice Department doing under Pam Bondi is seeking to make it harder for people to vote, not make it easier for people to vote; to deny people the right to vote, not to protect people’s right to vote. Sometimes it’s done in the name of claims about election fraud, but there have been virtually no evidence of election fraud. This is a kind of talking point on the Republican side that is used to justify making it hard for people to vote.

But why don’t they want people to vote? Because they don’t want to hear what the people have to say. But I think they will hear what the people have to say in the midterms, and it will not be pretty for the president.

AMY GOODMAN: Back in 2025, more than 200 former Justice Department employees accused the Trump administration of the destruction of the Civil Rights Division. The former employees alleged that Bondi and Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general, killed important cases protecting people from sexual harassment, police brutality and voting inequities. Can you talk about the significance of what has happened to the Voting Rights Division?

DAVID COLE: So, the Voting Rights Division is — again, its job is to protect —

AMY GOODMAN: I meant the Civil Rights Division.

DAVID COLE: Well, the Voting Rights Division, part of the Civil Rights Division. But the Civil Rights Division, as a whole, is a critical part of the Justice Department, and its job is to protect the civil rights of all Americans — the right against race discrimination, the right against police abuse, the right against sexual harassment and sexual assault, the right to vote, all of those, the right against housing discrimination. Those are what the Justice Department is supposed to be protecting the people of America from. This Justice Department has essentially run out the folks who do that work, and have instead turned it into yet another political arm of the White House, going after what they call “woke” policies and DEI policies that don’t violate anybody’s rights.

So, you know, Republicans and Democrats often have disagreements about where you should put your emphasis with respect to defending civil rights, but this department has simply obliterated the basic proposition that the Justice Department is there to protect us from wrongdoing, and instead turned it into a department that the president can use to further his own wrongdoing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: David, I wanted to ask you — this is not the first attorney general that Trump has fired. Talk about his record with previous attorney generals — Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr during his first term — and why he keeps getting rid of people whose advice he doesn’t like.

DAVID COLE: Well, you know, that’s the thing. I mean, yes, he’s fired previous attorney generals because they have dared to stand up to him, they have dared to say no. And these are not, you know, knee-jerk liberals. Jeff Sessions, very, very conservative man. Bill Barr, very, very conservative man. But they said no at various times to him, which is the job of the attorney general of the United States, and for that, they lost their jobs.

The remarkable thing about Pam Bondi is, as far as we can tell, she never said no — she never said no — and not withstanding never saying no, she lost her job, not because she dared to stand up to him, but because she didn’t deliver on what are really undeliverable promises. You know, you’re not going to be able to prosecute James Comey or Letitia James or Jerome Powell. Those are — those cases are going nowhere. And the fact that President Trump doesn’t like them because they did their job is not a crime and will not support a criminal prosecution. So, she was asked to do the impossible by the president. She failed to do the impossible. And so he has fired her.

And he’ll bring in somebody else and ask them to do the impossible. And either they will say no, and he’ll fire them, or they will fail because it’s impossible, and he will fire them. But he has basically asked the Justice Department to do things it cannot do.

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, I mean, perhaps the most significant image of Pam Bondi’s term as attorney general is her unfurling of that banner of President Trump over the Department of Justice.