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WASHINGTON — Six of President-elect Donald Trump’s big-office nominees faced Senate confirmation hearings Wednesday, previewing a parade of policy and political fights that will define his second term.
The picks — Pam Bondi for attorney general; Marco Rubio for secretary of state; Sean Duffy for transportation secretary; John Ratcliffe for CIA director; Chris Wright for energy secretary; and Russell Vought for director of the White House Office of Management and Budget — largely avoided the kind of fireworks that can sink confirmation chances.
At the same time, they collectively laid out visions for the agencies they hope to lead that comport with Trump’s campaign promises and political grievances.
Here are seven takeaways from the hearings.
Democrats poked and prodded each candidate to try to expose extreme views or daylight from Trump. But they don’t have enough votes to block any of the nominees on their own in the Senate, where Republicans will have a 53-47 edge once all their seats are filled. So, the big question for each hopeful was whether they would say anything that would cost them Republican votes.
The answers won’t be clear until the full Senate considers their nominations after Trump takes office next week. But none of them appeared to lose support from the GOP side Wednesday, portending an easy road for Wednesday’s cluster of picks.
The toughest sells — former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, to serve as secretary of health and human services and director of national intelligence, respectively, and Kash Patel for director of the FBI — have not yet had confirmation hearings.
Bondi pointedly refused to say that Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square under questioning from Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., during her hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in, and he is the president of the United States,” Bondi said. “There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024.”
Durbin, the top-ranking Democrat on the panel, noted that Bondi did not give him a yes-or-no answer. Later, Bondi declined to retract her past statement that Trump had won Pennsylvania in 2020 and pushed back on Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., for interrupting her.
“I’m not going to be bullied by you,” she told Padilla.
William Barr, Trump’s attorney general during the 2020 election, incurred the then-president’s wrath by refusing to use the Justice Department to back false claims of election fraud.
But Republicans are unlikely to vote against Bondi because of her views on the 2020 election.
Bondi told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., that she would not use the attorney general’s power to target political adversaries — even though Trump has often called for the investigation and prosecution of his rivals.
“There will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice,” Bondi said.
Last month, Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker that decisions about who to investigate and who to prosecute would fall to Patel and Bondi, assuming that they are confirmed by the Senate.
Patel has said that judges, lawyers and journalists should be prosecuted for perceived impropriety in pursuing investigations of Trump following the 2020 election. Bondi defended Patel Wednesday — to an extent.
“I don’t believe he has an enemies list,” Bondi said, adding that “Kash is the right person at this time for this job.”
But she told senators that they would have to ask Patel questions directly about his promotion of QAnon conspiracy theories.
As a senator, Rubio was a vocal opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Trump’s pick to be America’s top diplomat, he has been more measured in talking about the war between Russia and Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he, like Trump, wants a quick end to the war. And that, he said, will require Ukraine to give ground, either literally or figuratively.
“It is important for everyone to be realistic,” Rubio said. “There will have to be concessions made by the Russian Federation, but also by the Ukrainians.”
The comments were consistent with what Rubio has been saying since Trump’s election, but they signal an even more firm commitment to forcing a negotiated settlement at a time when it is not clear how much leverage Ukraine has.
Vought, seeking a return engagement as the White House budget director, suggested that he does not see the 1974 Impoundment Control Act as a binding law.
The law, designed to prevent the president from refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress, has been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in the past, and it was at the center of the House’s first impeachment of Trump.
Among other things, Trump was accused of improperly withholding appropriated funds from Ukraine in order to force the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, who was then considering a presidential bid.
“I don’t believe it’s constitutional,” Vought told Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “The president ran on that view.”
“You’re saying that you’re just going to defy the courts?” Blumenthal asked.
“The incoming administration is going to take the president’s view on this as he stated on the campaign, work it through with the lawyers at the Department of Justice,” Vought said, “and put that through a policy process and I can’t prejudge that policy process but I certainly can’t announce the parameters of what it would produce.”
Vought’s answers portend a coming battle over who controls the nation’s purse strings.
Ratcliffe and Duffy, both Republican former House members, generated little fanfare in their public hearings before the Intelligence and Commerce, Science and Transportation committees.
The Intelligence Committee also met with Ratcliffe behind closed doors in order to discuss classified or sensitive national security matters.
But in the public portion of his hearing, Ratcliffe said he believes China interfered in Trump’s 2020 re-election bid — a view he has long held that he readily acknowledged was at odds with most of the intelligence community.
“The minority opinion was that they were,” he said. “I agreed with the minority opinion, but what I did was not try to substitute my judgment for the community.”
Duffy committed himself to providing more robust oversight of the aviation industry through the department’s Federal Aviation Administration — and that he believes whistleblowers should be listened to.
“I 100% do,” he said.
Wright, an oil and gas executive, stood by a past social media comment about the “hype” over wildfires during his hearing to lead the Department of Energy.
“The hype over wildfires is just hype to justify more impoverishment from bad government policies,” Wright wrote in a LinkedIn post over a year ago.
Expressing “great sorrow” over the ongoing wildfires in Southern California, Wright told Padilla that he would not retract his past comment.
But Wright said Wednesday, “Climate change is a real and global phenomenon.”
Aside from several protests from climate activists that interrupted the hearing the exchange with Padilla was the most notable moment. That’s a good sign for his chances.
Jonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News.
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