What to Know
President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi Thursday after a rocky tenure marked by her fumbling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and her perceived failure to effectively carry out his campaign of legal retribution against political rivals. Bondi will be replaced at least temporarily with her top deputy, Todd Blanche, who was previously Trump’s personal lawyer.
Trump is considering appointing Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to the post, three people familiar with the matter said before Bondi’s ouster.
Trump has discussed his ongoing frustration with Bondi over her handing of the Jeffrey Epstein files and hurdles the Justice Department has encountered in investigations into Trump’s perceived enemies, the people said. The Republican president has mentioned other candidates but has raised Zeldin’s name as recently as this week, the people said.
Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Long Island who ran a strong losing campaign for governor, has been publicly and privately praised by Trump, who at an event in February described him as “our secret weapon.”
Bondi, a former state attorney general in Florida and a Trump loyalist who was part of his legal team during his first impeachment case, has been in her position for more than a year.
She quickly launched investigations of several Trump foes, sparking an outcry that the law enforcement agency was being wielded as a tool of revenge to advance the president’s political and personal agenda.
Bondi has also endured months of scrutiny over the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files that made her the target of angry conservatives even with her close relationship with Trump.
Under Bondi’s leadership, the department opened investigations into a string of Trump foes, including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.
The high-profile prosecutions of Comey and James were quickly thrown out by a judge who ruled that the prosecutor who brought the cases was illegally appointed. Other politically charged investigations have either been rejected by grand juries or failed to result in criminal charges.
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Dave Goldiner; New York Daily News; (TNS) || ©2026 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
