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By Graham Kates, Robert Legare, Melissa Quinn
/ CBS News
Washington — Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, vowed to end the “weaponization” of the Justice Department at her confirmation hearing on Wednesday, saying her focus will be on reducing crime and upholding the law.
The former Florida attorney general, who represented Trump during his first impeachment, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to testify about her nomination, which is all but certain to be approved in the GOP-controlled Senate.
She spent much of the hearing seeking to allay concerns from skeptical Democrats that Trump would use the Justice Department to target his political enemies once in office.
“There will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice,” Bondi said, adding that she believes prosecutors under President Biden unfairly targeted Trump for the last four years.
“I will fight every day to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice and each of its components,” she said. “The partisanship, the weaponization, will be gone. America will have one tier of justice for all.”
Democrats did not seem convinced, repeatedly pressing Bondi on whether she’d investigate and prosecute figures ranging from former Rep. Liz Cheney and former special counsel Jack Smith to journalists and Trump critics.
Trump selected Bondi to be his nominee for U.S. attorney general after his first pick, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration. Bondi made history in 2010 when she became the first woman to serve as Florida’s attorney general, a role she held for two terms.
“If confirmed as the next attorney general of the United States, my overriding objective will be to return the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe and vigorously prosecuting criminals,” Bondi said in her opening statement.
Bondi said her time as a local prosecutor framed her goals for the Justice Department, which she described as “getting back to the basics” of combating crime and reducing recidivism.
Republicans on the committee largely focused on Bondi’s decades of crimefighting experience as a local prosecutor, and later as Florida attorney general. They claimed the Justice Department has been “weaponized” in recent years for political reasons, pointing to the prosecutions of Trump that have been dropped since the election.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the committee’s top Democrat, noted Bondi’s experience, but said it is Trump who has vowed to use the Justice Department to target his political enemies. Durbin said he wants assurances that Bondi would keep the Justice Department independent, and would be willing to say “no” to Trump. Trump clashed with his two attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, over decisions they made in his first term.
Durbin asked Bondi if she accepted that Trump lost the election in 2020, a fact that he and many of his prominent supporters have not publicly acknowledged. Bondi stopped short of doing so Wednesday.
“There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024,” Bondi said. Bondi told Durbin that she “accept[s] the results” of the 2020 election but declined to say outright that Mr. Biden won.
Durbin asked if Bondi would support pardons for people convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Bondi said, if asked, she would review potential pardons on a “case by case basis,” adding: “I condemn any violence on a law enforcement officer in this country.”
Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, asked Bondi if she would “be willing to resign if ordered to do something improper.”
“Senator, I wouldn’t work at a law firm, I wouldn’t be a prosecutor, I wouldn’t be attorney general if anyone asked me to do something improper and I felt I had to carry that out, of course I would not do that,” Bondi said. “That’s one of the main things you learn as a young prosecutor, is to do the right thing.”
Later, she told Coons she and the president-elect have not discussed appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Mr. Biden — a threat Trump has made. Throughout the hearing, she argued she would keep the Justice Department independent from the White House, including by upholding a department policy limiting contacts with White House officials.
Bondi was repeatedly pressed by Democrats about whether she would target perceived Trump foes, including Cheney and Smith, who led the dual federal investigations against Trump. During one particularly heated exchange, she declined to say if she knew of any factual predicate for investigating Cheney, and told California Sen. Adam Schiff his concerns are misplaced.
“You’re all so worried about Liz Cheney, senator, you know what we should be worried about? The crime rate in California right now is through the roof,” she said.
Bondi was also asked by Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, about the reauthorization of Section 702, a government intelligence collection tool that has come under fire from some Republicans in Congress. She said she would take a look at the issue and called Section 702 a “very important tool.”
Bondi’s confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee was one of several taking place before GOP-led panels this week as Trump prepares to begin his second term in office. Republicans have indicated they plan to give substantial deference to Trump as he fills out the top ranks of his administration and are aiming to install key Cabinet officials to their posts soon after the president-elect is inaugurated Monday.
Bondi spent the weeks leading up to her confirmation hearing meeting with senators on Capitol Hill, and she is not expected to face significant hurdles in the Republican-led Senate.
Ahead of the hearing, Durbin accused Trump of using the Justice Department as his personal law firm and said he was concerned Bondi will prioritize fealty to Trump over loyalty to the Constitution. He met with Bondi last week.
Bondi was term-limited in her position as Florida’s attorney general and left office in 2019. While in office, she spearheaded lawsuits against the Obama administration, challenging the Affordable Care Act — known as Obamacare — and then-President Barack Obama’s immigration policies.
She went on to serve as an attorney and lobbyist at the firm Ballard Partners. There, she represented large corporations like General Motors, Amazon, Uber and the American Institute Against Human Trafficking, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks lobbying. And she submitted a registration with the federal government to lobby on behalf of Qatar “regarding Qatari relations with U.S. government officials, U.S. business entities, and non-governmental audiences, in dealing with matters pertaining to combating human trafficking.”
At her hearing on Wednesday, Bondi said she was “very proud of the work that I did” with Qatar, telling Durbin her work was focused on “anti-human trafficking efforts related to the World Cup.”
“I was registered as FARA along with many members of my firm. That was the sole portion of my representation for Qatar,” she said, referencing a federal law that requires lobbyists who work for foreign countries to register with the government.
During Trump’s first term, Bondi briefly left her lobbying position to serve as a member of his defense team during the first set of impeachment proceedings pursued by congressional Democrats. She defended Trump’s July 2019 call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, in which Trump pressured Zelenskyy to investigate Mr. Biden.
The Democratic-led House voted to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstructing a congressional investigation, making him just the third U.S. president to ever be impeached. The Republican-led Senate then acquitted him following a trial, where Bondi was part of the team representing Trump.
In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Bondi spearheaded legal efforts to challenge the results in Pennsylvania and pushed the false claim that Trump won the state. She was asked about that work in Wednesday’s hearing.
“I was an advocate for the campaign, and I was on the ground in Pennsylvania and I saw many things there. But do I accept the results? Of course I do. Do I agree with what happened?” Bondi said. “No one from either side of the aisle should want there to be any issues with election integrity in our country. We should all want our elections to be free and fair, and the rules and the law to be followed.”
Bondi was also among the Trump allies who traveled to New York and spoke out in defense of the president-elect early last year during his “hush money” criminal trial. A jury convicted Trump on 34 state felony counts of falsifying business records in May and he was sentenced last week.
After the Justice Department brought criminal charges against Trump in 2023, Bondi told Fox News, “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated because the deep state last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight on them.”
If confirmed, she will now lead that department and will have the power to look into various aspects of the investigations into Trump that were led by Smith. She will also oversee the numerous law enforcement components under the Justice Department, including the FBI and the ATF, two organizations that have been targets of the president-elect and his allies.
Bondi will also oversee implementation of aspects of Trump’s agency and lead the department that will defend the president-elect’s actions in federal court.
contributed to this report.
Graham Kates is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice, privacy issues and information security for CBS News Digital. Contact Graham at KatesG@cbsnews.com or grahamkates@protonmail.com
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