FIRED! Pam Bondi OUT at DOJ after failed ‘revenge’ prosecutions & Trump admin’s Epstein TURMOIL

[0:00] We start tonight with a major shakeup at the Department of Justice. [0:04] President Trump has fired Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi after just a 14-month tenure [0:11] leading the DOJ. Bondi is now the second member of Trump's cabinet to be forced out in the second [0:18] term. Bondi reportedly ended up in the president's crosshairs for a couple of reasons, principally [0:25] her handling of the DOJ's Epstein files. We'll have more on that later. Also an issue was her [0:31] failure to successfully prosecute the president's political foes. Let's take a look at how some of [0:37] that played out. Trump putting extraordinary pressure on his Attorney General Pam Bondi, [0:44] publicly calling on her to use the power of the Justice Department to prosecute his political [0:48] enemies. Notable cases include two failed attempts to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James. [0:54] Today's ruling means, at least for now, [0:56] both cases will be dismissed. Federal charges have been dropped against Mayor Ras Baraka [1:00] following his arrest outside an ICE facility. Bondi is the one who installed Lindsey Halligan [1:06] as the interim U.S. attorney. That has been invalidated. Both Halligan and Bondi should [1:11] be disbarred. Those are just some of the many cases that the DOJ has tried without success [1:19] to pursue. Here are some more. Judges have pushed back in each case, saying that the challenges [1:26] themselves lack legal merit. [1:29] And with any government shakeup, it seems that breaking up is hard to do. Bondi reportedly did [1:35] not want to leave her post at DOJ. The New York Times reports that she spent much of yesterday [1:41] making her case to stay in the cabinet. Bondi, however, released a statement saying otherwise. [1:49] She wrote, quote, that she is thrilled to be moving to the private sector and will [1:53] continue fighting for President Trump. Trump announced the shakeup in a Truth Social post, [2:01] saying that Deputy AG Todd Blanch will serve as acting attorney general until a new AG is nominated. [2:08] Blanch, who was once Trump's personal lawyer, is not without controversy himself. Last year, [2:14] he conducted a much-discussed interview with Jeffrey Epstein's convicted associate, [2:19] Ghislaine Maxwell. In the wake of that interview, Maxwell was transferred without explanation [2:24] to a minimum security prison. Last week, Blanch was at CPAC, where we got a sense [2:32] the new acting AG's priorities. Take a listen. [3:04] MSNOW reports that the president is considering a [3:07] list of candidates to replace Bondi, and the list includes EPA head Lee Zeldin, [3:12] Republican Senator Eric Schmidt, and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, [3:16] who is currently overseeing a controversial case against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. [3:23] Joining me now to discuss all of this is Molly Jung Fast, [3:26] New York Times opinion writer and the host of the Fast Politics podcast. [3:30] Also with us is Andrew Weissman, former FBI general counsel, former Mueller prosecutor, [3:35] and an MSNOW legal contributor. [3:37] Andrew, let's start with you. AG Pamela Jo Bondi is now out. What's your reaction? [3:46] So I think there's a temptation in these kinds of stories to focus on the person who was fired. [3:53] What did they do right? What did they do wrong? And I think that in this instance, [3:58] that is going to be going straight for the capillaries. I think she is a symptom of what [4:06] is going on in the White House, and specifically the Oval. [4:09] Office. This Department of Justice was a plaything to Donald Trump. And moving the deck chairs [4:18] around, shifting who is in charge is not going to change the policies and practices that are so [4:26] antithetical to the rule of law. So while she is out, I think that is really not the story. I think [4:33] I don't see them putting anyone else in who's going to adhere to, [4:39] the longtime values of the Department of Justice under Republican and Democratic administrations of [4:46] being independent of the White House about who gets charged and who does not get charged. [4:53] Molly, what's your take on this? So Andrew has basically said that the whole corpus is rotted. [4:59] It doesn't matter who's at the head. What's your take? That's a fundamental indictment [5:03] of the Department of Justice. [5:04] From someone who knows what the Department of Justice is supposed to look like. [5:08] I would say what's me. [5:09] What's meaningful about this is not so much that she's gone, but how she's gone. [5:14] Remember, Donald Trump made a real point in Trump 2.0 of not firing people. [5:18] And he would even, Kristi Noem was moved to a really great fake job, right? The Shields of [5:24] America. Which sounded like something from the Marvel Universe, but apparently is a real thing. [5:29] Right. A real thing that they clearly made up. But, you know, so I do think it's important that [5:34] this really happened. They did not move her. They just fired her. He fired her via [5:39] tweet. You know, we're already seeing leaking, right? She spent yesterday. How do we know? She [5:44] spent yesterday begging for her job because someone leaked it. So we're already seeing [5:48] leaking. And remember, one of the reasons why Trump tried not to fire people this time [5:53] is because when he did last time, all anyone did was leak. So the fact that he has done this, [5:58] done this so quickly, did not give her a fake job. Even Mike Walls got another job. [6:04] So I think that is very meaningful. Look, I don't know how he gets someone Senate confirmed again. [6:09] I guess he's going to have to take another senator. But the actual movement and the sort [6:14] of inability to keep someone, I think that's meaningful. So, Andrew, going back to your [6:19] bigger point about the rot at the DOJ, one of the reasons the president was apparently so frustrated [6:26] with Bondi was that she had not done enough, in his view, to secure wins against his perceived [6:32] enemies. Given that so much of her tenure was spent trying unsuccessfully to prosecute the president's [6:39] perceived enemies, what's the nature of the legacy that she leaves behind? [6:43] And what will her successor have to achieve going forward to live up to this president's [6:48] expectations? Well, I sort of view that as the president being unwilling to look in the mirror [6:55] and understand that he had unrealistic expectations, saying that, oh, she's not [7:02] effective because she wasn't able to re-indict and then re-indict again Letitia James, or to [7:10] indict someone else. So I think that's a really important point. And I think that's a really important [7:10] point. And I think that's a really important point. And I think that's a really important point. [7:10] I think that's a really important point. So when you have six members of Congress for doing the [7:13] unspeakable, which is speaking the truth and doing so protected by the First Amendment, [7:19] those are not failings of the Attorney General, other than the Attorney General should never [7:23] have approved them. But another Attorney General is not going to do any better. The problem [7:29] is the President, not the Attorney General. I mean, obviously, the Attorney General should not [7:34] be subservient. They are professional. They should be saying no. But it's really, to me, [7:40] me, is the president thinking, oh, there is no such thing as a rule of law. And if I can just [7:45] get somebody more effective, they can sort of trample on the rule of law better than Pam Bondi [7:51] did. And I think that ignores the fact that you have grand jurors and you have judges in the [7:56] system and they can push back and have pushed back on illegal practices. That's a great point, [8:03] Molly. I mean, it wasn't that Pamela Joe Bondi didn't try to launch these prosecutions. It's [8:08] that judges were like, no, that won't fly. Or jurors would say, like, we're not going to issue [8:12] a bill in that case. The New York Times reports, though, that this particular attorney general was [8:19] a real loyalist. According to the New York Times, Bondi was, quote, like a radio built to pick up [8:25] only one channel to Mr. Trump's demands. Ms. Bondi gained and maintained her position through [8:31] her attentiveness, loyalty and obedience. And that makes her uniquely vulnerable to shifts in the [8:37] president. [8:38] Opinion. Well, I mean, what to say? Well, this is the Trump 2.0 problem, right? There's a cabinet [8:46] filled with people who have their jobs because of their fealty to Trump and not much else. [8:50] I think it's very hard for women to do MAGA. We've seen this again and again. This is something I [8:58] think we've talked about. We've talked about this. Yeah. Because part of MAGA is this rage, [9:03] is this ability like Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings, this ability to turn a [9:08] question on a question. [9:09] To sort of be so angry. Yeah. And American women, our culture has not embraced the angry woman as [9:17] of yet. And MAGA is this hyper-sexualized Mar-a-Lago face, you know, a certain aesthetic, [9:22] which really runs contrary to pushing back against a questioner quite that way. [9:28] Well, let me push on this. It strikes me that the only two people who have yet to be ousted [9:34] from this cabinet are women. And there weren't a lot of women to begin with. And there's a lot of [9:39] rumblings that maybe the third will be Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI, head of DNI. What does that say [9:47] about this administration's interest in protecting and defending women, letting women have a real [9:52] seat at the table, as it were? Yeah. Remember in Trump 1.0, where they couldn't, they didn't have [9:58] enough women and they kept bringing in like they have Ivanka. I mean, everyone here is like a [10:04] non-playing character except for Trump. Yeah. So everybody has been sort of put in there because [10:09] they're actors. [10:09] And that, he even says that, you know, that he was impressed with Pete Hexeth because of the way [10:14] he was on television. You know, these people are actors in sort of Trump's, you know, reality show [10:22] presidency. Andrew, the DOJ has obviously much changed after Bondi's tenure. Is there any hope [10:31] that this ship will right? What will need to happen, whether it's in the next attorney general's [10:36] tenure or even beyond that, to make the Department of Justice? [10:39] Well, you know, I mean, I think the Department of Justice is going to be the entity that we have [10:41] always known it to be in both Republican and Democrat presidents' past. [10:46] That's a nice, that's a nice small question there. I mean, that is a huge, huge issue. [10:51] Please answer it in one minute. [10:53] Yeah. So first, don't have any hope for Todd Blanch. In many ways, this is not just the [11:00] firing of Pam Bondi, but it's the snubbing of Todd Blanch. I mean, the normal process would [11:05] have been to elevate him and propose that he will be the next attorney general. [11:10] And so essentially, the sins that we've been talking about that are against her are against [11:18] him as well. And so also, I can't imagine a confirmation hearing for him because it would be [11:25] very much a bloodbath and would put front and center issues like Epstein, which we'll talk [11:31] about. And so another Justice Department is really going to have a hard time because once you've [11:39] broken those norms, [11:40] there are going to be people who really think that that's something you can do.