Early in Trump’s first administration, legal reporter Benjamin Wittes created one of the best descriptions of President Donald Trump’s administration: “the evil caused by carelessness.” Trump, as Wittes wrote earlier, often issued executive orders that were not scrutinized by lawyers or policy experts — and thus were at risk of impeachment and often had very little success. And this tendency to take seemingly bold actions that fall apart once exposed in the real world has run rampant in both Trump administrations.
No one embodied Trump’s brand of misogynistic hatred more than outgoing Attorney General Pam Bondi, who, as Trump announced Thursday, will “change” to “.new jobs in the private sector.” During his 15 months as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, Bondi broke the rules, until the end of the Nixon administration, which wanted to insulate federal prosecutors from political control by the White House. But his real-life attempts to use the Justice Department to retaliate against Trump’s perceived enemies have repeatedly crumbled on a beach of crooked lawyers.
Bondi may be best known for saying, in a February 2025 interview with Fox News, that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s client list was “I’m sitting at my desk right now” — months before the DOJ later claimed that this list does not exist. After being asked about his mishandling of the Epstein files in a congressional hearing, he told lawmakers that they shouldn’t even be talking about Epstein because “The Dow is over 50,000 right now.” (As of this writing, Dow Jones Industrial Average it sits at 46,371.57.)
Consider, likewise, the Trump DOJ’s attempts to prosecute Former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, two officials Trump hates because they investigated the president’s alleged illegal activities. Both charges were dismissed by a federal court, however, after a judge ruled that Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance attorney whom this administration tried to install as the top federal prosecutor in Virginia, was. has never been legally appointed.
Similarly, when the Trump administration ordered thousands of federal law enforcement officers to take over the city of Minneapolis and arrest dozens of immigrants in the city, a competent attorney general would have realized that mass arrests would be possible. initiate a series of legal consultationsand would have detailed additional attorneys for Minnesota to handle the surge in cases. Instead, the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota was nearly understaffed, and completely unprepared for a series of court orders, requiring the administration to release many of the immigrants it had just arrested.
Federal judges criticized the negligence of the Department of Justice in their opinion – the chief judge of the federal district court wrote that the Trump administration “decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens. without giving any conditions for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other legal cases that will surely arise.” One DOJ attorney, who was given an impossible caseload of 88 cases in one month, told the judge that sometimes he wished to be held in contempt of court so that he can sleep in prison.
At one point, Bondi’s Justice Department incompetence even threatened the Republican Party’s ability to hold political power. Last November, a federal court in Texas he hit the Republican party leader which is expected to gain the GOP five more seats in the House after the 2026 midterms. The court opinion, written by a judge appointed by Trump, relied on a letter from one of Bondi’s top deputies, which effectively ordered the state of Texas to redraw its maps on racial grounds that are prohibited by the Constitution.
Although the Supreme Court eventually reinstated the administrator, the lower court’s decision was based heavily on Supreme Court precedents that questioned racially motivated laws. All this drama could have been avoided if Bondi’s DOJ had not sent its letter, which the judge said was “challenging to open” because “contains numerous factual, legal, and typographical errors,” the Texas Republican gerrymander would never be in any danger.
This list is just the beginning. Not every Republican attorney general loyal to Trump would make such fundamental mistakes in pursuing his agenda. And there is no guarantee that Bondi’s successor will share his ineptitude. So Trump’s opponents may want to wait and see what happens next before celebrating Bondi’s humiliation.
Bondi’s ouster gives Trump the chance to appoint a suitable fiend to run the DOJ
The Justice Department’s oversight of the bond would be more important if Republicans did not have a firm grip on the federal judiciary. For now, at least, lawsuits challenging mass unlawful detention in Minnesota have been put on hold due to a decision by two Republican appellate judges maintaining that this detention was, in fact, legally granted. The Texas court’s ruling against the state’s gerrymander was closed by a Republican Supreme Court.
Still, Bondi’s ineptitude may haunt the DOJ for a long time, even if it doesn’t show it anymore. Federal judges have historically treated Justice Department attorneys with a degree of respect, because for decades the DOJ maintained a well-deserved reputation for being transparent with judges and employing experienced attorneys. But now many judges openly question the Department of Justice in their opinion. That means rank-and-file Justice Department lawyers will have to spend countless hours pressing claims that federal judges would have previously only believed.
Meanwhile, the worst-case scenario for Trump’s political enemies, and for anyone else the Justice Department decides to target for political reasons, is that Bondi could be replaced by a competent attorney. (The full list of potential Bondi replacements is not yet known, but some early reports suggest so EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is under consideration)
A competent attorney general would ensure that a legally appointed prosecutor brought charges against Comey and James. A powerful attorney general might have willingly leaked the Epstein documents that mention Democracy, instead prompting Congressional action requiring all documents to be issued. And a competent attorney general would consider DOJ lawyers’ time valuable, because every minute a prosecutor spends on unnecessary work is time they can’t spend advancing Trump’s agenda.
It remains to be seen who Trump will choose to replace Maladroit Bondi. But there is no shortage of Republican lawyers who are very good at their jobs. Trump can find someone like him First term Attorney General Bill Barrwho was an incredibly capable advocate of the MAGA agenda. And if that happens, anyone lucky enough to land on Trump’s enemies list will miss Pam Bondi.
