Washington (Somalia Today) – US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Attorney General Pam Bondi was leaving her post, ending a turbulent year-long tenure at the Justice Department marked by failed political prosecutions and controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Bondi, 60, led a deeply polarising period at the department, working to align an agency that has historically operated with a degree of independence from presidential influence with Trump’s political priorities.
Her departure marks the second major cabinet reshuffle in recent weeks.
It follows the early March firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom Senator Markwayne Mullin replaced after bipartisan criticism over departmental spending and border operations.
Trump confirmed Bondi’s departure in a social media post on Thursday afternoon.
“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump wrote.
The president said Bondi would soon move to a “much-needed and important new job in the private sector”, but did not give details.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump who won confirmation last year to the department’s second-ranking role, will take over on an acting basis.
“Pam Bondi led this Department with strength and conviction, and I’m grateful for her leadership and friendship,” Blanche wrote in a social media post.
It was not immediately clear whom Trump would choose to permanently replace Bondi. She won Senate confirmation in February 2025 after the withdrawal of initial nominee, Matt Gaetz.
‘Weak and ineffective’
During her tenure, Bondi took steps that Trump’s first-term attorneys general had largely resisted.
She oversaw the firing or departure of scores of prosecutors and career officials who had investigated Trump and his allies in recent years.
In a highly visible display of loyalty, she authorised the placement of a large banner featuring Trump’s face on the exterior of the Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
Despite those efforts, Trump had privately complained for months that the former Florida attorney general was “weak and ineffective”, sources familiar with the matter said.
They said he repeatedly expressed frustration that she had moved too slowly to bring criminal cases against his perceived political adversaries.
Epstein backlash
The tipping point appeared to be a combination of courtroom setbacks and political fallout over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Trump blamed Bondi for months of political and personal pressure surrounding the release of FBI files related to the late convicted sex offender.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to release the Epstein client list.
He later signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025, requiring the Justice Department to release the documents.
But when the December deadline arrived, Bondi’s department released only a fraction of the material, with significant redactions that obscured the names of politically exposed individuals.
The rollout drew sharp criticism from both parties.
After sustained pressure from Democrats and from Trump’s own base, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Bondi earlier this month to sit for a closed-door deposition in April.
Reports said Trump had considered firing her in January over the backlash but had been persuaded to wait.
Targeting rivals
Beyond the Epstein files, Bondi’s effort to prosecute Trump’s political rivals repeatedly faltered in federal court.
In September, Trump used a social media post to single out former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James as targets for prosecution.
In what appeared to be a public effort to press Bondi, Trump wrote: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
Days later, the Justice Department secured an indictment against Comey on charges of obstruction and lying to Congress, and later brought charges against James.
Both cases collapsed late last year when a federal judge dismissed them, ruling that the Trump-appointed prosecutor leading the effort had been unlawfully installed.
Bondi then authorised efforts to revive the cases, but grand juries twice rejected attempts to secure a new indictment against James.
Election grievances
In recent weeks, Bondi tried to shore up her standing by stepping up efforts to advance Trump’s lingering grievances over his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
In January, she allowed FBI agents to seek a search warrant to seize tens of thousands of ballots from the main election office in Fulton County, Georgia.
Just last week, she quietly authorised a US attorney in North Carolina to launch nationwide investigations into the 2020 election.
The move came after Trump voiced frustration that the department had not done enough to investigate his unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.
Despite the political rupture, Trump at times remained personally warm towards Bondi, who served as one of his defence lawyers during his first impeachment trial in 2020.
Her removal closely mirrors Trump’s fraught relationships with his first-term attorneys general.
He pushed out Jeff Sessions after Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Sessions’s successor, William Barr, resigned after publicly contradicting Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020.
Unlike her predecessors, Bondi went to considerable lengths to address Trump’s core grievances, including appointing a US attorney in Miami to reopen scrutiny of the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In the end, however, her failure to secure convictions against Trump’s highest-profile targets and the political fallout from the Epstein files proved fatal to her tenure.
