Pam Bondi is getting grilled before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
President-elect Donald Trump's choice to head the Justice Department -- former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi -- faced questions for more than five hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Democrats asked about her vow to "prosecute the prosecutors—the bad ones," referring to special counsel Jack Smith and other DOJ lawyers who investigated Trump. Democrats on the committee also pressed Bondi on Jan. 6, the 2020 presidential election results, and how she would be independent of hypothetical Trump demands.
Republicans on the committee spent a lot of their time criticizing the DOJ under the Biden Administration, alleging it was weaponized to target Trump.
The committee will reconvene to hear from outside witnesses on Thursday.
Pam Bondi has developed a reputation as one of President-elect Donald Trump's most loyal defenders -- a vocal political and legal advocate who represented Trump during his first impeachment, boosted his efforts to sow doubts about his 2020 election loss, and stood by him during his New York criminal trial. Read more about her background here.
Bondi – Trump’s pick to head the Justice Department – has vowed, in a 2023 interview on Fox News, to ‘’prosecute the prosecutors – the bad ones’’ who investigated Donald Trump.
Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee — whose members will question Florida’s former attorney general – has said ‘’she has echoed the President[-elect]’s calls for prosecuting his political opponents, and she has a troubling history of unflinching loyalty to the President-elect.”
