Why Pam Bondi is a dangerous pick to lead the DOJ

 

Wednesday, November 27 Many breathed a sigh of relief that former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz would no longer be considered to lead the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). But President-elect Donald Trump’s replacement pick, Pam Bondi, might be worse. Also in this edition: Experts weigh in on the coming legal battle on Project 2025’s most egregious policy proposals and a post-mortem on the post-election litigation battle in Pennsylvania. As always, thanks for reading. And have a happy Thanksgiving! — Matt Cohen, Senior Staff Writer At Democracy Docket, we prioritize our readers in everything we do. Help support our pro-democracy news outlet as we continue to hold those in power accountable. Join us in the fight for a stronger, more transparent democracy. Why Pam Bondi is Trump’s Pick to Lead the DOJ’s Assault on Voting Rights After some nomination drama — with Trump’s original attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz, removing himself from consideration amid scandal — the president-elect then named former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as his pick to lead the DOJ. Though some breathed a sigh of relief that a DOJ led by Gaetz is no longer on the table, Bondi is by no means a better choice. And in some regards may be worse. Bondi is a longtime close ally of Trump. She was involved in his 2016 campaign and was one of his main attorneys during his 2019 impeachment over his quid pro quo phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She also occasionally advised Trump on pardons during his first administration — including the woman who orchestrated one of the biggest medicare frauds in history. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Bondi was one of several Trump lawyers who was spreading voting conspiracy theories and false allegations of election fraud. She was part of the Trump campaign’s legal effort to challenge ballots in Pennsylvania in 2020 and went on to spread false allegations of election cheating in the state. But what makes her a more troubling AG pick than Gaetz is her work after Trump’s first presidency. Since 2021, Bondi has been chair of the America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) center for litigation and co-chair of its center for law and justice. As one of AFPI’s leading figures, Bondi spearheaded the group’s efforts to disenfranchise voters around the country. Under Bondi, AFPI led a multistate legal effort to overturn a pro-voting Biden executive order that expands voting access. AFPI also got involved in several election lawsuits in Arizona, challenging parts of the state’s Elections Procedural Manual. I bring all of this up to quantify why I think Bondi is a more troubling pick than Gaetz to lead the DOJ. It’s no secret that Trump wants to radically reform the DOJ. As my colleague Kaei Li wrote, “when Donald Trump launched his third presidential campaign in 2022, he promised to ‘immediately demand voter ID, same day voting, and only paper ballots’ if elected.” Now that he has been reelected, he picked perhaps the best person, in Bondi, to help fulfill that promise. At least, a much better choice than Gaetz, who is barely a lawyer. How to Combat Project 2025 Speaking of the DOJ, now that Trump is elected and we know that Project 2025 is the agenda, there’s a lot of questions about what is — and isn’t — actually achievable in the GOP’s authoritarian playbook. As much as I’m wondering just how much Bondi can transform the DOJ to suppress voting rights and punish Trump’s political enemies, I’ve also been wondering if many of the proposals outlined in Project 2025 are legally feasible. At the top of the list is the plan to reimplement Schedule F and radically remake the federal workforce with MAGA loyalists. If you’re not familiar with Schedule F, it originally appeared at the tail end of Trump’s first term as an executive order to reclassify tens of thousands of civil service employees. The order essentially stripped their employment protections so they could more easily be dismissed from their jobs if perceived as disloyal to the administration. Project 2025 suggests reintroducing Schedule F as a crucial first step in replacing tens of thousands of nonpartisan civil servants with, essentially, Trump supporters. Is this actually possible? That’s the question that was eating away at me, so I reached out to a few organizations who would be directly affected or involved with Schedule F. “Repeatedly throughout the Project 2025 chapters, they say to just move forward, go ahead and implement and worry about defending it in court later,” Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), told me. “Expect legal challenges, because they know what they’re doing is unlawful.” That’s also essentially what Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan legal and public policy research nonprofit Democracy Forward, also told me. Under Perryman’s leadership, Democracy Forward is preparing for those legal fights, with an initiative called Democracy 2025 — a coalition of hundreds of lawyers from 280 different organizations to fight Project 2025 and the coming Trump administration in the courts. “There’s a range of policies in Project 2025, and that the President-elect has announced, that he’s seeking to pursue that we believe suffer from legal infirmities, and believe that legal challenges are going to be important,” Perryman said. “There will be swift and robust legal opposition to some of the most destructive policies of Project 2025. That would include things like seeking to undermine our civil service, including trying to reimpose Schedule F.” In Pennsylvania, A Tense Post-Election Legal Battle Despite what many people expected, the 2024 general election was not a repeat of 2020. Far from it. No spread of voting conspiracy theories from the right. No illegal attempts to subvert the election results. And, most notably, no national tidal wave of post-election lawsuits trying to disenfranchise voters. Pennsylvania is a bit of an exception. The Keystone State’s extremely tight U.S. Senate race — between incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D) and Republican challenger David McCormick — came to an end last week, in the midst of a recount. Under Pennsylvania law, an automatic recount is triggered when a race is within a 0.5% margin, unless the losing candidate waives it. The race between Casey and McCormick narrowed to just 0.2%. In the midst of the recount, there was a wave of lawsuits from both Democrats and Republicans, with the Dems trying to get as many votes counted as possible and the GOP trying to throw out votes. At the heart of the lawsuits were questions of which ballots, under Pennsylvania law, should be counted. Prior to the election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued an order saying that undated or wrongly dated mail-in ballots can’t be counted in the general election. Some county boards of elections opted to ignore the order, prompting a handful of GOP lawsuits. Other lawsuits focused on if certain provisional ballots that lacked proper signatures should be counted or not. The courts ruled in favor of Democrats in a handful of these cases. Ultimately, it didn’t matter: As judges issued more rulings to dismiss ballots than they did to count them — and it became clear that, despite the small margin, a recount probably won’t go in Casey’s favor, he conceded. “As the first count of ballots is completed, Pennsylvanians can move forward with the knowledge that their voices were heard, whether their vote was the first to be counted or the last,” Casey said.