U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi during a July 8 cabinet meeting at the White House.
Photo: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On my first day as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, I received “the Reservoir Speech.”
Justice Department alums are nodding in recognition; we all got some variation of the talk. In broad strokes: Think of DOJ as a reservoir and the water in it as public trust. It takes years to build up that water supply, but even a slight crack can drain it quickly. Now that you’re part of the Justice Department, you’ll have the benefit of the doubt, and judges and the general public will believe you because of that hard-earned public trust. Don’t be the one to crack the reservoir and drain it.
After just five months leading the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi is threatening to leave the reservoir tapped out. She has confirmed the worst fears of Democrats who opposed her from the start, and now she’s pulled off the more difficult task of alienating conservatives and the pro-Trump MAGA base (those two categories not necessarily being one and the same).
Liberals distrusted Bondi all along. She wasn’t quite as outrageous a selection for AG as Matt Gaetz, who never made it to the confirmation stage; at least Bondi had been a prosecutor for over 20 years, including two terms as the attorney general of Florida. Unlike Gaetz, she was qualified — on paper.
But Bondi’s natural political antagonists doubted her credibility. After the 2020 election, Bondi falsely proclaimed that “we won Pennsylvania … we are thrilled to have won Pennsylvania,” despite Trump’s loss by over 80,000 votes. Bondi publicly cited “evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots.” No such evidence ever materialized. And Bondi went beyond rhetoric. She strategized with other Trump advisers to use those false claims to challenge the 2020 election results in the courts. When Bondi was questioned at her February 2025 confirmation hearing about her election lies, she retreated to the bullshit signifier fashioned by other Trump-loyal power-seekers: “President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in.”
During her short stint as AG, Bondi has continued to prevaricate, casually at times and tactically at others. In April 2025, she boldly proclaimed that Trump had single-handedly saved 258 million lives by seizing dangerous fentanyl. (The day before, she had posited that Trump had saved a piddling 119 million lives.) Apparently, if not for the president, about three-fourths of the American public would be dead right now.
More consequentially, Bondi showed herself to be both a hopeless partisan — that part was already widely suspected — and an inveterate truth-stretcher when she refused even to open an investigation into the misuse of the Signal messaging app by top intelligence officials. To explain her inaction, Bondi preposterously concluded (despite having done zero investigation) that specific information about impending military attack plans was somehow “not classified and inadvertently released.”
None of that made a dent with Trump loyalists, however. It took the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, with all its attendant conspiracy-mongering, to turn them against the attorney general.
Bondi, you may recall, marched into the AG’s suite promising jaw-dropping revelations about the infamous child molester’s expanded network. In February 2025 on Fox News, she teased an impending initial release of Epstein-related materials as “breaking news.” Credulous conservative influencers posed on the White House lawn, self-importantly holding aloft binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase I.” Turned out, those binders contained about 200 pages of documents, most of which had been previously released and none of which established anything new or interesting.
Some Republican officials and many in the right-wing media universe flipped out at Bondi’s failure to deliver as promised. Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna vented on X, “THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment.”
Frantically backtracking, Bondi promised more still. She vowed that a second, even juicier document dump was imminent and claimed she had somehow been duped by miscreant FBI agents who withheld thousands of documents. When asked on Fox News about the purportedly incriminating, undisclosed Epstein “client list,” Bondi promised, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”
But this week, Bondi’s own Justice Department acknowledged it was all flimflam. DOJ investigators concluded in an internal memo that, after an exhaustive review of over 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence, there was nothing to the wildest of the conspiracy theories: no incriminating client list, no blackmail, no jailhouse murder, no basis to investigate or charge anybody else. The report offered a sharp rebuke to Epstein conspiracy theorists: “One of our highest priorities is combating child exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.” And the memo announced a blunt end point: “No further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” (If Bondi knew what she was doing, she never would have wandered aimlessly down the path of disclosing information from closed criminal investigations in the first place.)
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When asked about Bondi’s apparently false statement that she had the (nonexistent) client list on her desk, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered up cringey word salad: “Yes, she was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. That’s what the attorney general was referring to.” Well, that explains that.
This week, Bondi tried at a Cabinet meeting to spin her own prior fib about having the “client list” on her desk while Trump, visibly agitated, snapped, “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking — we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.” In this moment, Trump was absolutely spot on in his exasperation.
MAGA culture isn’t taking it well. One right-wing influencer posted, “At this point she just has to be fired.” Another lamented that Bondi’s response to the Epstein situation “makes Trump and his entire administration look so bad I don’t even have words for it.” Heavyweight firebrand Tucker Carlson accused Bondi of “covering up crimes.” Laura Loomer called Bondi a “dumb lying bimbo” and urged Trump to fire her. Megyn Kelly excoriated the AG for being “either lazy and incompetent or she willingly humiliated some of the president’s most loyal supporters;” Kelly predicted that Bondi’s “days are numbered.”
Bondi likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. She’s too loyal to Trump to find herself in imminent danger. But she’d be well advised to remember two things about Trump. First, he’s sensitive to criticism from certain media outlets, especially right-wing influencers. And second, Trump will cashier an AG who he does not trust to serve his best political purposes. Recall his humiliating public dismissal of Jeff Sessions via Twitter, moments after the 2018 midterms, and his sudden parting of ways with Bill Barr in December 2020, just days after Barr called out Trump’s election-fraud nonsense.
Bondi was never going to win over liberals or Trump haters. But she somehow managed to sling so many false promises that she’s earned the ire of many of Trump’s most loyal supporters. Now she’s left that reservoir of credibility — DoJ’s and her own — bone dry.
Elie Honig is the author of the forthcoming book When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump, available for preorder now.
