Pam Bondi: History’s Smarmiest Attorney General

Her binder wasn’t full of facts, but of insults, securing her place in the ignoble roll call of those who betrayed their oath.

Pam Bondi’s contemptuous Senate hearing performance was shocking in style. She arrived armed not with briefing materials or case law but with a thick binder of opposition research on Democratic senators, pages scrawled with insults and ready-made smears. When close-up cameras caught a glimpse, you could read her notes like a high-school burn book: A few key exchanges show the pattern.

On Donald Trump in the Epstein files

• Question: “Did the DOJ flag that Donald Trump’s name appears in the Epstein files?”

• Bondi: “I’m not going to respond to you on that.”

Rather than deny or clarify, she refused outright, not even pretending to account for her department’s handling of the most politically explosive evidence before her.

On Tom Homan’s $50,000 cash payoff

• Question: “Is there a tape of Mr. Homan accepting $50,000 in cash at a restaurant?”

• Bondi: “You would have to talk to Director Patel about that.”

• Follow-up: “No, I’m talking to you.”

• Bondi: “I don’t know the answer, Senator.”

Ignorance as a shield.

As former DOJ official Harry Litman pointed out: “There is no such thing as an attorney general not knowing whether her top immigration official was caught on tape taking $50,000.”

On DOJ misconduct more broadly
When asked about Trump’s overreach in Chicago, Bondi sneered:

“I wish that you loved the people of Chicago, Senator, as much as you hate Donald Trump.”

Not only nonresponsive, but dripping with contempt. Instead of explaining DOJ authority, she accused the senator of hating the president.

On oversight itself
When cornered by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse over her handling of Epstein evidence, Bondi lashed out with one of her pre-written binder lines:

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you took money from Reid Hoffman.”

It was wrong, Whitehouse’s campaign never accepted funds from Hoffman. But accuracy didn’t matter. The attack was the point.

Taken together, the pattern is unmistakable:

• Silence when the question cuts too close.

• Ignorance when silence won’t suffice.

• Smears when ignorance begins to crumble.

Bondi didn’t show up to testify. She showed up to perform, mostly for an audience of one, with her binder as the script and the Senate as her stage.

Instead of answers, the Attorney General offered theater. Asked about Epstein, she pivoted to accuse senators of hypocrisy. Asked about Homan, she claimed ignorance. Asked about DOJ misconduct, she waved away questions as partisan attacks. Her binder was her shield, a weapon against oversight, not a record of facts.

In this, Bondi is not new. She is the latest heir to a long and disgraceful tradition: the justice minister who ceases to defend the law and instead defends the ruler.

We’ve seen her kind before. Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell went to prison for Watergate, but not before bending the DOJ into Nixon’s personal protection racket. Harding’s Attorney General Harry Daugherty buried corruption probes until Teapot Dome exploded. William Barr provided a veneer of legality for Trump’s abuses in his first term, misrepresenting the Mueller Report and intervening to protect cronies. Each in their time turned the law into a weapon for power, not a shield for the people.

Bondi also sits comfortably beside the Orbán prosecutors in Hungary who bury cases against the ruling party, or Berlusconi’s justice ministers who rewrote laws to protect their boss. She mirrors the swagger of Fujimori’s spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos, who used oversight hearings to attack opponents rather than answer for state crimes. The script is universal: dodge, deflect, smear, survive.

Bondi’s contribution is not innovation but performance. She weaponizes hearings as theater. When asked about Epstein or Homan’s bag of cash, she doesn’t stumble, she brandishes her “burn book” of personal insults at senators, prepared not to explain but to humiliate. It is the purest expression of Trump’s DOJ ethos: accountability is weakness, and the best defense is a televised counterattack.

If Bondi’s Senate hearing revealed her contempt for oversight, her press conference today revealed the other half of the act: pure performance.

Standing at the podium, she rattled off a disjointed litany of violent incidents, a lawmaker murdered in Minnesota, an arson attempt on Governor Shapiro’s house, explosives found at a D.C. church, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, with no coherent throughline except to inflate the atmosphere of menace. She declared:

“We cannot allow this political violence to continue any longer. This arrest will serve as a reminder to many: do not do this. We will find you.”

The arrest in question? A man who mailed a vile death threat to right-wing media personality Benny Johnson. A serious crime, yes, but the press event was staged like a counterterrorism victory, with Bondi flanked by law enforcement brass, Johnson praising the Trump administration for “saving his family,” and Bondi herself invoking “evil” and “light versus darkness.”

It was political theater, not a law enforcement briefing.

And the timing is telling. Just days after being torched in Senate hearings for refusing to answer about Epstein, Tom Homan’s $50,000 bag of cash, and other DOJ scandals, Bondi appeared before cameras with the kind of choreographed outrage designed to shore up her image. The binder of insults became a podium of platitudes. The evasions became proclamations.

But the purpose is the same: deflect scrutiny, inflame supporters, and prime the public.

• If it was about image, the performance was meant to rebrand Bondi as the stalwart defender of families, law enforcement, and “faith and values”, rather than the slippery AG who wouldn’t answer simple questions under oath.

• If it was about priming, it was a message to the public: expect more overreach, more conflating of dissent with terrorism, more politicized prosecutions dressed up as salvation.

As Harry Litman said of her hearing, “facts and law are what matter.” But Bondi isn’t interested in facts or law. She’s interested in stagecraft. She is writing her legacy in soundbites, not statutes.

What’s most disturbing is that history suggests she will likely pay no real price. Mitchell served time, but Nixon’s crimes left scars that still shape our politics. Daugherty resigned, but Teapot Dome did not cleanse the system. Barr slipped back into comfortable retirement. Abroad, Berlusconi’s ministers and Orbán’s allies live in quiet wealth, their corruption normalized. The pattern is clear: they may stumble out of office, but they rarely face justice. The people, not the fixers, carry the cost.

Pam Bondi may think she’s writing her legacy in the ink of partisan victory, but history has a longer memory. What she delivered at the oversight hearings wasn’t strength, it was smarm. Her binder full of insults, her bobbing evasions, her mock outrage, all of it exposed her as a sycophantic tool of Trump rather than an independent guardian of justice, or god forbid, a woman of substance.

She will not be remembered as a lawyer, but as a shield. Not as a servant of justice, but as a servant of power. And not even a strong one at that, more a stage prop, performing loyalty through sneers and silence, unable to answer the simplest questions without retreating into smears.

Bondi has secured her place in the ignoble roll call of attorneys general who betrayed their oath. That list is long, international, and infamous, from Nixon’s John Mitchell to Orbán’s prosecutors. But few have managed to look so transparently weak while doing it. History will remember her not as formidable, but as smarmy. Not as tough, but as servile. And not as a leader, but as a warning.