Epstein Blunders and Tossed Indictments: The Downfall of Pam Bondi

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Michael Barbaro** (0:31)
Hey, it's Michael. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about a new show from our colleagues over at Serial Productions. It's a new five-part series featuring New York Times columnist M. Gesson, and it's a remarkable one. In the show, M tells a story about a cousin named Alan, who is currently in prison for murder for hire. It's a story about family, about what we do when members of our family do bad things, about betrayal, and the craving to know the truth. It's thoughtful, it's complicated, and it's very funny. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. And we hope you check it out. The series is called The Idiot. Okay, here's today's show. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
How Pam Bondi went from being the loyal attorney general of President Trump's dreams to a blundering figure whom he abruptly fired on Thursday afternoon. I turned to the journalist who broke the story that Bondi was about to be ousted. White House reporter Tyler Pager. It's Friday, April 3rd. Well, Tyler, here we go again.

**Tyler Pager** (2:09)
Another one bites the dust.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:11)
Yes, a second cabinet member fired by President Trump in four weeks. And arguably, this firing ends the career of a cabinet member who is even more important to the president than the last one, Kristi Noem, head of Homeland Security, because this is the attorney general. And this attorney general, until the very end, strikes me as a very paradoxical figure because she is simultaneously as absolutely loyal a foot soldier as you could fathom, and yet somebody who keeps letting the president down.

**Tyler Pager** (2:48)
You're absolutely right, Michael. Pam Bondi was executing on a wide-ranging agenda that the president outlined when he ran for president for a third time. He wanted to lead a retribution campaign against his political opponents, and much of that depended on having an attorney general willing to shatter decades-long norms about how a justice department operates, which traditionally is independent from the White House. In no way, shape or form did Pam Bondi even try to be independent. She bragged about how much she worked at the directive of Donald Trump, but even that wasn't enough for him. On top of that, she created a political crisis of her own making in her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:38)
Right. We will get to the Epstein files for sure. I want to though keep digging into the specifics of Bondi's loyal service to Trump and what she gave the president within the DOJ, because it was a lot.

**Tyler Pager** (3:52)
Yeah. Michael, a good place to start is in March of 2025, at the Justice Department Headquarters.

**Pam Bondi** (4:00)
Welcome to the Department of Justice.

**Tyler Pager** (4:03)
She invited the president to come speak, and before he speaks, Pam Bondi gives a speech.

**Pam Bondi** (4:10)
We all work for the greatest president in the history of our country.

**Tyler Pager** (4:14)
What she says is that she is working for the greatest president in the history of our country.

**Pam Bondi** (4:19)
We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.

**Tyler Pager** (4:23)
We are so proud that she works at the directive of Donald Trump. Now, that is unprecedented. In previous administrations, attorneys general would try to not even appear at certain White House events because they didn't want to seem too close or cozy with the president and his allies. Pam Bondi is taking it in the exact opposite direction, touting how much she takes direction from Donald Trump.

**Pam Bondi** (4:51)
He will never stop fighting for us and we will never stop fighting for him and for our country.

**Tyler Pager** (4:59)
And then over the course of her tenure, she did many of the things that he wanted her to do. She oversees a wide scale purging of Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on cases investigating Donald Trump when he was out of office.

**Michael Barbaro** (5:19)
And we should just say, those FBI agents, those DOJ lawyers, they didn't necessarily seek to be on those cases. They were assigned to investigate Trump by their bosses. And suddenly, Pam Bondi is saying, doing your job and upsetting the president means that you are now out of a job.