‘She Has Failed Miserably’: CNN’s Elie Honig Shreds AG Pam Bondi for Acting Like the ‘White House Press Secretary’
CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig blasted Attorney General Pam Bondi for sounding more like a “press secretary” than the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Honig appeared on Friday’s edition of The Lead, where guest host Phil Mattingly pointed to Honig’s latest piece in New York magazine regarding the infamous Signal security leak. On Monday, The Atlantic revealed that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat with Trump administration officials who were discussing upcoming airstrikes on Yemen. In the chat, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave a blow-by-blow description of how the attacks would be carried out. President Donald Trump and his administration have responded by lashing out at the media and not firing anyone involved.
“It’s certain that Bondi and everyone else in DoJ leadership knows what happened,” Honig wrote. “Yet I feel confident predicting that the Justice Department won’t lift a finger to investigate this mess.”
Mattingly aired a clip of Bondi responding to a reporter’s question about whether her department would investigate the leak.
“First, it was sensitive information, not classified,” the attorney general said. “And inadvertently released. And what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission.”
Honig replied by saying her response underscored his point.
“Here we have a very high stakes, complicated set of facts,” he said. “It cries out for a fair and impartial investigation by the nation’s leading law enforcement agency. Instead, what the attorney general has done is – with zero investigation, with zero facts – she comes out and decrees that the facts are exactly as Donald Trump would wish them to be. With zero facts, zero investigation, she says, ‘There’s no classified information.’ Highly dubious.”
He then noted that he had previously said that Bondi, who served as Florida’s attorney general, was qualified on paper, but she would need to assert her independence. Instead, “she has failed miserably” in that regard:
I have to say, when Pam Bondi was nominated, I came on air and said she’s absolutely qualified on paper to be the attorney general. But the test is going to be can she exercise independence? And right here she has failed miserably. That statement was something much more like you’d hear from a White House press secretary than the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
Watch above via CNN.
