By ERIC TUCKER, ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and MARY CLARE JALONICK Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pam Bondi, Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, insisted at her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday that the president-elect had been “targeted” by years of investigations and pledged she would not “politicize” the Department of Justice if confirmed as the country’s chief federal law enforcement officer.
The statements echoed Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric that the Justice Department had been weaponized against him and came as Democrats repeatedly pressed her to maintain the department’s independence from the White House and to provide reassurances she would not use use the agency’s law enforcement powers to exact retribution against the Republican’s adversaries, including the investigators who investigated him.
“What would you do if your career DOJ prosecutors came to you with a case to prosecute, grounded in the facts and law, but the White House directs you to drop the case?” asked Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, in one in a series of similar exchanges.
“Senator,” Bondi replied, “if I thought that would happen, I would not be sitting here today. That will not happen.”
The line of questioning from Democrats laid bare what they see as the stake of Bondi’s appointment, particularly given the pressure Trump wielded on his Justice Department during his first term to represent his personal interests. Republicans, by contrast, eagerly welcomed Bondi as a course correction to a Justice Department they believe has pursued an overly liberal agenda and unfairly pursued Trump through investigations and a special counsel appointment resulting in two indictments.
“If confirmed, I will work to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice — and each of its components,” Bondi said. “Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end. America must have one tier of justice for all.”
Bondi stressed she would uphold the Constitution and said the American public, not the president, would be her client.
But she also made clear her allegiance to Trump by repeatedly refusing to denounce some of his most incendiary stances, such as his claims that supporters arrested in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol were “hostages” or “patriots.”
Given a chance by Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat, to reject that characterization, Bondi simply said: “I am not familiar with that statement.”
Bondi also wouldn’t directly answer when asked whether Trump lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, only going so far initially to say that Biden is the president.
She later said she accepted the results of the election, but she also suggested there was fraud — alluding to her time as an advocate for the campaign in Pennsylvania in the days after the 2020 election.
Bondi told lawmakers she saw “many things” on the ground in Pennsylvania,” adding: “We shouldn’t want there to be any issues with election integrity and our country.” She made claims of “fake ballots” and “cheating” in Pennsylvania in 2020, but there is no evidence of widespread fraud that impacted the outcome of the election.
She also appeared to back up Trump’s claims that the prosecutions against him amounted to political persecution, saying the Justice Department “had been weaponized for years and years and years, and it’s got to stop.”
“They targeted Donald Trump,” Bondi said. “They went after him — actually starting back in 2016, they targeted his campaign. They have launched countless investigations against him.” She added: “If I am attorney general, I will not politicize that office.”
The suggestion that the investigations into Trump were politically motivated has been sharply contested by Attorney General Merrick Garland and by special counsel Jack Smith, who in a report released this week said that politics played no part in his decisions and that the evidence his team gathered was sufficient for Trump to have been convicted at trial on charges of scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Smith dismissed that case and a separate one charging Trump with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after Trump’s election win in November to comply with longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting criminal cases against a sitting president.
The Justice Department under Garland also investigated Biden over his mishandling of classified information — no charges were filed — and named a special counsel to investigate Biden’s son Hunter, who was charged with tax and gun crimes before being pardoned by his father in December.
Democrats including Sen. Dick Durbin seized on Bondi’s yearslong presence in Trump’s orbit and her public defense of him on cable news appearances, including one on Fox News Channel last year in which she said: “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones. … The investigators will be investigated.”
Bondi has also said members of the so-called deep state were “hiding in the shadows” during Trump’s first term “but now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated.”
Such comments have raised alarms that the department under Bondi’s watch could pursue investigations at Trump’s behest. Although longstanding norms dictate that presidents have no hand in individual criminal investigations, Trump was known during his first term to call for specific inquiries into adversaries and berated his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for having recused from an investigation into Russian election interference that ultimately shadowed much of his tenure.
“I need to know that you would tell the president ‘no’ if you’re asked to do something that’s wrong, illegal or unconstitutional,” Durbin, the panel’s top Democrat, told Bondi, noting how she had been his personal lawyer and had echoed his baseless claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the committee, offered a different take, laying out a laundry list of years of grievances against the Justice Department that includes the Russia investigation and more recently a Garland-era memo aimed at targeting threats from parents at school board meetings.
“Ms. Bondi, should you be confirmed,” Grassley said, “the actions you take to change the department’s course must be for accountability, so that the conduct I just described never happens again.”
Bondi, a corporate lobbyist who spent 18 years in the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office in Florida, was named to the attorney general position after Trump’s first pick, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration during fallout over a federal sex trafficking investigation that ended without charges.
She pledged to protect the First Amendment rights of free speech and religion and the Second Amendment right to bear arms and to reform the beleaguered federal Bureau of Prisons.
“If confirmed as United States Attorney General,” she said, “my overriding objective would be to return the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe and vigorously enforcing the law.”