Senate confirms Pam Bondi to lead Justice Department

The Senate on Wednesday voted to confirm Pam Bondi as the next attorney general, giving her control of a Justice Department embroiled in controversy.

The vote was 54-46. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) joined all Republicans in voting in support of Bondi.

Bondi, a two-term attorney general in Florida, has been lauded for her prosecutorial experience and work battling the opioid epidemic in the Sunshine State.

But she is also a former attorney for President Trump who worked on his 2020 election challenge and has been highly critical of the criminal investigations into him, even calling for “prosecutors to be prosecuted.”

Her nomination inspired scrutiny from Democrats over whether she will maintain an independent Justice Department.

“If confirmed, I will work to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice — and each of its components. Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end,” Bondi said at her confirmation hearing.

Democrats overseeing her nomination were unconvinced.

"President Trump has said time and again that he expects the Justice Department to seek ‘retribution’ on his behalf. With Ms. Bondi, I’m afraid, the president has finally found someone who passes his loyalty test,” Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the top Democrat on the panel, said during a Monday floor speech.

Bondi refused to answer a number of questions she dismissed as hypotheticals, sidestepping inquiries about whether she would appoint a special counsel if Trump was accused of doing something illegal. She also declined to say whether she would investigate former special counsel Jack Smith.

She also declined to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election, instead saying only that former President Biden, still in office at the time, was the sitting president after a “peaceful transition of power."

“President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in, and he is the president of the United States. There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024,” Bondi said.

In a floor speech Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) noted that numerous Democrats had acknowledged Bondi was qualified for the role.

"If my colleagues will not cross the aisle to vote for this qualified nominee, they’ll show that Senate Democrats are intent on opposing President’s Trump’s Cabinet picks for purely partisan reasons," he said.

Bondi takes the reins of the department at a critical time.

The Justice Department has fired or reassigned a number of career staff, including dismissing a dozen prosecutors who worked on Smith’s team.

FBI agents who worked on Trump’s two criminal cases were also escorted out of the building last week.

Prosecutors who worked on the more than 1,500 cases of those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were also let go from the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C.

And Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, formerly Trump's criminal defense attorney, has demanded the FBI turn over information on the role thousands of FBI agents played in those cases.

Bondi received a letter from Durbin on Tuesday asking whether she was aware of “the removal, resignation, or reassignment of any career civil servant” and asking for her communications with the Trump transition team as well as current Justice Department leadership.

Bondi’s confirmation comes as senators are still weighing the nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI, with Bondi facing numerous questions about how she would deal with any abuse of power by Patel.

“If he is confirmed, and if I am confirmed — he will follow the law if I am the attorney general of the United States of America. And I don’t believe he would do anything otherwise,” she said.

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