Inside Trump's Decision to Fire Bondi

This is a music for your own. The video is also released on Windows with Shopify, which is a great help to support your own company. Now, justice and intelligence reporter Ken Delaney, former U.S. Attorney and MSNL legal analyst, Barb McQuade, host of the Tarapal Mary Show podcast and author of the Red Letter Substack Tarapal Mary, and the New York Times opinion columnist David French. It's great to have all of you guys with me this afternoon. Ken, I will start with you, Pam Bondi's original sitting here was when she promised the Epstein client list.

“Back in December, Susie Wiles told Chris Whipple and Vanity Fair, quote, "I think she completely whipped on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this.”

When she gave them binders full of nothingness, and then she said that the witness list or the client list was on her desk, there is no client list, and it sure is how it wasn't on her desk." So, Ken, why did it take this long for her to get fired? Well, I think because Antonio, my reporting suggests that, although everything you said about her mishandling of the Epstein matter is correct and definitely set the stage for this day and lost her support in the Republican Party, equally, if not more important factor in Donald Trump's mind, was his desk dissatisfaction with her inability to carry forward the prosecutions that he wanted,

directed at his perceived political enemies. And I was talking to people inside of the Justice Department today who are very frustrated about that, because their sense is that she was impeded not by any lack of will on her, or by the legal system, by grand jewellery's that refused to indict and by judges who threw cases out against former FBI Director James Coney, for example, in the Attorney General Littisha James. So, and for that reason, she's being amply criticized today in these post-mortems by Democrats who say she shattered the independence of the Justice Department and corruptly twisted it to the political whims of the White House by pursuing these investigations,

but it wasn't enough for Donald Trump, because she didn't get results, and I'm not sure that anybody is going to be able to get to kind of results that he's looking for. Remember, famously, he sent that message on truth social back in September, which may have been intended as a private message to Pam Bondi, where he was complaining that she wasn't moving fast enough against his enemies to Adam Schiff and James Coney and Littisha James. But there's no doubt going back to the Epstein case that that dogs her, because she promised the moon and then had to adopt the Justice Department position.

Remember, they issued a statement saying, "We don't plan to release any files. We don't think there's any reason to do that. There's certainly no grounds to indict anybody." That was the official Justice Department position. It was only after Congress got involved in past this law that required them to release these files, and they did so by a lot of accounts poorly. They made mistakes. They redacted things that should have been redacted. They released the names of victims. And in the end, it appeared that they were pulling back things that were detrimental to Donald Trump, and then they would post them later.

So it was a bit of a debacle, and it definitely lost her confidence among congressional Republicans.

“But I think at the end of the day, at least my sources are saying, the deciding factor was Donald Trump's dissatisfaction with her inability to go as far as he wanted and putting his enemies essentially in jail.”

Can we just got a new statement from Pam Bondi? So I want to read some of it.

Over the next month, I will be working tirelessly to transition the Office of Attorney General to the amazing Todd Blanch before moving to an important private sector role.

I am thrilled about, and where I will continue fighting for President Trump in this administration. That's just the first of a couple short paragraphs. Tara, I imagine today, or actually don't have to imagine, because we just had Stacey Williams on in the last hour. But for many of the victims, today must be a bit hard.

While they may be grateful to hear that Pam Bondi, someone who they have described is basically refusing to meet with them.

Look at them in the eye famously during a hearing. The person who has taken her job is the guy who flew down to talk with Galane Maxwell. And then the main thing, at least from many of their points of view, that came out of that, was just that Galane Maxwell got better digs, not that they got any more justice and accountability.

“What kinds of conversations are you having with the network, the community of survivors today?”

Yeah, they're really disappointed, but I mean, they're also equally angry at Pam Bondi.

They felt that she never took them seriously, like you said, she wouldn't even turn around to acknowledge them when they were standing behind her,

And they were standing up behind her. She wouldn't even acknowledge it said that she didn't want to get into the gutter with the Congresswoman. That was a privilege, I apologize, who was directing the questions at them. There was a really, really heartbreaking moment for me when I heard from one of the survivors.

This was shortly after the first batch of Epstein files were released, and this survivor was really hoping to meet with Pam Bondi.

And she said that they had a meeting in the books and actually asked me, told me this off the record at the time, because she felt that if I had reported on it, that it might cause the meeting to be canceled.

“That's how much hope she was gripping onto and how desperately she felt that if she could only see Pam Bondi face to face, she could reason with her, woman to woman and explain why this justice is so important for them.”

And the other survivors after decades being ignored by various justice departments led by men. I mean, this was the first woman to lead a justice department. And they really hoped that they could break through and then at the last minute that meeting was canceled by Pam Bondi. Well, this is a woman to lead the justice department, but also as you know, earlier in her career, she had made prosecuting people who abused children, sex offenders as a major part of her identity. I mean, another version of Pam Bondi when she was working in Florida, there were some people who thought that this might be something she might take very seriously.

Barb, I want your thoughts on what comes next here, because of course, Democrats are trying to make clear that they still expect her to show up in just a matter of days to testify under oath. But our colleague Michael Schnell is reporting that at least from Chairman Comer at oversight, that from a spokesperson that she's been in touch with, they're re-reviewing that, basically looking to see if her coming before lawmakers is still going to be necessary.

“In your view, will she still need to show up and testify under oath?”

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Stepstown is the most important talent for all-Jobs. Well, it seems that until Congress gets answers to its questions, somebody needs to come and testify under oath. Perhaps Todd Blanche is a better person to come and testify under oath if he's going to be leading the department. But I think many of the questions that remain unanswered relate to the F-teen files, the redactions, the failure to follow up on investigations, the failure to pursue investigations against people identified in those files.

“And so, testimony under oath, I think is important from a high level official at the Justice Department.”

But if I think if I were a member of Congress thinking about that, I might prefer to make it Todd Blanche. He is going forward going to be the leader of the Justice Department, at least in the short term, and he played a key role in overseeing the production and the redaction of the F-teen files. I think at this point, I might prefer to go after Blanche, who still got some skin in the game as opposed to Bondi, who might be a convenient person for the Justice Department administration to throw under the bus.

David, we know from Ashley Parker, who I had on in the last hour that Blanche is hoping that this interim job becomes a permanent job.

He'd like to stay in the role, she even says that at times he's basically felt like he was always a better fit for it than Bondi was.

But then we also know from the reporting that Lee Zelden thinks he's going to be up for the job. Can you tell us a bit about how they're viewed among conservatives? And if you have a position on who's most likely to come out as the actual Trump pick here? You know, that's a really good question. I would say Todd Blanche, his star, his risen in MAGA over the course of the last 12 months. He's been the Trump enforcer. He has been the very tip of the spear.

He's somebody who's kind of taken part of the lead in politicizing the Department of Justice. And so this is a guy who, I don't think that anyone in MAGA would question his commitment to doing exactly what Trump tells him to do. Now, I don't think you'll have any more success than Pam Bondi had because, you know, as we said earlier, she was running up against the justice system. She was running up against federal judges. She was running up against grant juries. I don't think Todd Blanche will have better success.

Lee Zelden, I would say, is more universally respected amongst Republicans and say Todd Blanche, Todd Blanche might be more narrow cast MAGA.

But both of them are going to face the same issue. They're going to face unreasonable demands from an unreasonable boss that they cannot possibly deliver because they do not control the judiciary.

They do not control juries. And so we're just going to see the cycling, this escalating discontent and cycling as even people like a Pam Bondi who will abandon all of the DOJ standards for Trump.

Still cannot bend federal judges to their will. And that's the firewall. That's the firewall right now. That's frustrating Trump and no attorney general can do it darn thing about that.

Well, David, no attorney general can do a thing about the juries, the judges, the facts in any one of these cases.

“But do you think either, at least just to take these two, Blanche and Zelden, do you think either of them have the ability to build a new type of relationship?”

With the F-steens survivors to take a different approach to look them in the eye to show more empathy than we've seen from the DOJ.

Maybe, but then any time you're doing that, you're running headlong against Donald Trump. Because it's very clear that Donald Trump wants all of this F-steens stuff completely, totally behind him.

“And so any empathy you show towards victims, any sort of consideration you give them is giving more oxygen to something that Donald Trump quite obviously just wants to go away.”

And so this is one of those very tiny few areas where MAGA and Trump is a diverge. Because MAGA has traditionally been super alarmed and concerned about Epstein. Trump not so much because of his obvious entanglement. And so here's where Trump is of departs from MAGA and Trump is the head of the executive branch.

“And I don't think Blanche or Zelden will have one millimeter of room to maneuver on the Epstein case without Trump watching them like a hawk.”

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