Kevin Williamson Calls Bondi’s Reign at DOJ ‘A Crime Spree’ — Calls for Florida Bar to Disbar Her

AP Photo/Tom Brenner

The Dispatch’s national correspondent Kevin Williamson eviscerated Pam Bondi’s tenure as Attorney General in a column Monday, accusing her of having presided over “a crime spree” and calling for the Florida Bar to disbar her.

Last Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that Bondi was leaving her position as Attorney General, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche would step into the role on an interim basis.

Rumors had been circulating for weeks that the president was unhappy with Bondi’s work as AG for multiple reasons, but especially her handling of the Epstein files. Earlier this month, Bondi had back-to-back appearances before congressional committees on the topic of the deceased child sex predator that were widely viewed as a disaster. Still, Trump maintains he is still happy with Bondi and wished her well in her future private sector gig.

The matter seems far from settled for Bondi’s numerous critics on both sides of the aisle, including both MAGA Republicans frustrated with the lack of new prosecutions from the Epstein files and those who have denounced many of the DOJ’s prosecutions under her leadership as unconstitutional, politically motivated, or otherwise improper.

Williamson focused on Bondi’s use of prosecutions as a form of “political vendetta” in his column on Monday, which was titled “Justice, Upside Down.”

The former attorney general “is an exemplary specimen of the sort of people who thrive in Donald Trump’s orbit: She is in a profound moral sense a criminal, but we lack an appropriate law under which to prosecute her,” wrote Williamson, declaring Bondi’s 14 months leading DOJ as using “her official duties” to conduct “a crime spree.”

“Her legacy is that she used the DOJ to launch a series of pretextual criminal investigations and prosecutions targeting the president’s political enemies, even when there was not the hint of an actual legal case to be made against them,” listing numerous local officials in Minnesota, Democratic elected officials, and several former Trump administration officials who had become targets of the president’s wrath — and ended up facing a prosecution from a DOJ run by his appointees as a result.

Bondi accomplished “very little” while she was at DOJ other than abuse the awesome powers of the DOJ to abuse, harass, and conduct retribution against the president’s political enemies,” he added, other than the surreal photo-op where she handed out “a bunch of fake ‘Epstein files’ binders” to a group of MAGA influencers.

The conundrum, Williamson acknowledges, is that whatever law might be envisioned that would make it easier to prosecute Bondi is the same sort of law that could be weaponized by an AG like her, because “in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s.”

There is, however, the possibility that the Florida Bar could impose a meaningful penalty on her, Williamson wrote, because the Florida Bar can disbar an attorney for “cumulative misconduct,” and even permanent disbarment “where an attorney’s conduct indicates he or she engages in a persistent course of unrepentant and egregious misconduct and is beyond redemption.”

“Having recently celebrated the Resurrection, I do not believe that a human being is ‘beyond redemption’ as a spiritual matter,” Williamson concluded. “But as to the question of whether a lawyer or a government officer is beyond redemption: If Pam Bondi has not engaged ‘in a persistent course of unrepentant and egregious misconduct,’ then who has?”

Complaints about Bondi have been previously submitted to The Florida Bar by multiple elected officials and organizations but have yet to lead to any disciplinary actions, with the Bar declining to proceed because of a longstanding rule against prosecuting federal constitutional officers while they remain in office. One coalition has vowed to refile an amended complaint against Bondi with the Bar now that she is out as AG, with additional information that has since come to light since their first attempt last year.

Read the column at The Dispatch.

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