AP
Washington, Updated At : 11:50 AM Apr 04, 2026 IST
Pam Bondi is out after failing to secure criminal convictions against several of President Donald Trump’s political opponents — but her departure doesn’t guarantee a successor will fare better.
Over the past year, the Justice Department under Bondi ran into pushback from judges, grand juries and career prosecutors while pursuing allegations against one Trump adversary after another. A new attorney general will face Trump’s insistence on politically charged prosecutions — a theme since his first term — along with the same skeptical courts and legal obstacles that frustrated Bondi.
“At the end of the day, it’s not like there were some magic steps that Pam Bondi could have taken to make bad cases look good to grand juries or judges,” wrote Peter Keisler, a former acting attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. “The problem is that the president is demanding that prosecutions be brought when there’s no evidence and no valid legal theory. A new Attorney General won’t change that.”
Bondi was the latest in a line of Trump-era attorneys general pressed to satisfy the president’s demands for loyalty and retribution. Trump publicly criticized Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia probe and pushed him out, and he clashed with William Barr when Barr refused to endorse false election-fraud claims; Barr soon resigned.
Bondi, who joined the Justice Department 14 months ago, praised Trump and launched investigations into Democrats and other critics despite concerns from career prosecutors about the strength of the evidence. After Trump urged her on social media last September to charge former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, prosecutors obtained indictments in Virginia.
Those victories proved fleeting. A judge later dismissed the cases after finding the prosecutor who filed them, Lindsey Halligan, had been illegally appointed. Grand juries declined to return new mortgage-fraud charges against James, and the Comey case has stalled on evidentiary disputes and statute-of-limitations questions. Both Comey and James deny wrongdoing and have called the prosecutions politically motivated.
Other efforts also faltered. A federal grand jury in Washington refused to indict Democratic lawmakers over a video in which they urged service members to resist “illegal orders.” And a judge quashed Justice Department subpoenas seeking Federal Reserve records related to testimony by Chair Jerome Powell about a $2.5 billion building renovation. Judge James Boasberg said the government had “produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime” and called the subpoenas a “thin and unsubstantiated” pretext to force Powell to cut interest rates. A prosecutor later conceded the probe had not found evidence of criminality.
An investigation in Florida into former CIA Director John Brennan’s congressional testimony about Russian election interference has been open for months but has not produced charges; Brennan’s lawyers have called it baseless. Separately, former national security adviser John Bolton could face trial in the future on classified-documents allegations from a probe that predates Bondi’s tenure.
For now, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is leading the Justice Department. Blanche has long ties to Trump, having served as one of his personal lawyers. Several sources told The Associated Press that Trump has privately mentioned Lee Zeldin, his EPA chief and a loyalist, as a possible long-term replacement.
Observers say the next attorney general will likely be expected to more aggressively pursue the president’s campaign of retribution. “If she was fired because Trump did not think that she was moving quickly enough in bringing criminal cases against his political enemies, then you would expect that the person that would replace her would probably agree to escalate those efforts,” said Jimmy Gurule, a former Justice Department official and Notre Dame law professor.
Blanche signaled a similar sentiment in a Fox News interview, saying, “I think the president is frustrated, everybody is frustrated” and adding that “what we saw happen for the past four years is unforgivable and can never happen again.”
