President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday.
Bondi’s firing comes after reports that Trump was unhappy with his performance Department of Justice files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the DOJ’s failure to successfully prosecute several of the President’s political enemies.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch will be the acting attorney general, Trump said.
Trump is reportedly considering Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin as Bondi’s permanent replacement.
“Pam Bondy is a great American patriot and a loyal friend who served faithfully as my Attorney General this past year,” Trump wrote. A post on Truth Social.
“Pam has done a tremendous job leading a massive crackdown on crime across our country, reducing homicides to their lowest level since 1900,” the president wrote.
“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, and our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected legal mind, Todd Blanch, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General.”
US Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks while participating with US President Donald Trump in a roundtable discussion with the Fraternal Order of Police at the White House on June 5, 2025 in Washington, DC, US.
Kent Nishimura | reuters
Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, in A post before Thursday on X Said, “If the report is true that Lee Zeldin will replace Pam Bondi as Attorney General – I welcome it.”
“Bondi handled the Epstein files appallingly and made this situation much worse for President Trump than it should have been,” Mace wrote. “I look forward to a new Attorney General.”
Trump, in his second term, has been much more conservative in firing high-level officials than his first term, which was marked by a series of sudden terminations, including that of his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks at a press conference to announce an update on the Epstein files at the Department of Justice on January 30, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Anna Moneymaker getty images
Trump fired Sessions in May 2017 after the then-attorney general recused himself from overseeing the DOJ investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign’s contacts with Russians, leading the DOJ to appoint special counsel Robert Mueller to take over that investigation.
Bondy is widely seen as the mastermind behind the release of files related to Epstein, who years ago was a friend of Trump.
Bondi initially promised to release DOJ documents about Epstein after Trump returned to the White House last year, whose criminal activities have been of keen interest to the president’s MAGA political base.
She later reneged on that promise after making a show of giving out binders of documents to Trump-friendly social media influencers that included information about Epstein that had previously been publicly available.
Congress later overwhelmingly passed a law mandating that the DOJ release all of its files on Epstein by December 19. Although the DOJ had released many documents by that date, it failed to release millions more documents until weeks later, and even then withheld many documents.
on 17th March The House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena to Bondy, She was forced to sit by the DOJ on April 14 to testify about her handling of the Epstein files.
Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat who is the ranking member of the oversight panel, in a post on x “Pam Bondy and Donald Trump may think their dismissal will prevent them from testifying before the Oversight Committee,” he wrote Thursday.
“They are wrong — and we look forward to hearing from them under oath,” Garcia said.
On November 24, Bondi and the DOJ were embarrassed by the dismissal of two federal criminal prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump had pressured Bondi to bring criminal charges against Comey and James, who are his enemies.
Comey was accused of making false statements and obstruction in his testimony before Congress years ago. James was charged with bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution in connection with a mortgage she obtained to purchase a home in 2020.
Both denied any wrongdoing and said the prosecutions were politically motivated.
A federal judge dismissed the cases against both after finding that Lindsey Halligan, the then-interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who secured the indictments against Comey and James, was illegally appointed.
Halligan is one of several top federal prosecutors whose appointments during the second Trump administration have been deemed illegal.