Administration

The Memo: Bondi’s failure to get Trump his ‘scalps’ sealed her fate

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by Niall Stanage - 04/03/26 6:00 AM ET

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by Niall Stanage - 04/03/26 6:00 AM ET

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President Trump’s biggest fans and strongest critics agree on something: The downfall of Pam Bondi as attorney general had two causes.

The largest failure was her inability to secure convictions of the president’s enemies despite his adamant urging that she should do so.

“He is looking for scalps but she hasn’t delivered,” said one GOP strategist well connected to Trump’s orbit, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She didn’t deliver the kind of results that the president was hoping for. She tried and didn’t succeed — and in Trump World that doesn’t fly.”

Trump’s critics have the slimmest sliver of sympathy with Bondi in that regard. They contend a vengeful president expected her to accomplish the impossible — securing guilty verdicts without clear and compelling evidence. But, they also note, she was an eager partner in that quest.

The second key problem — Bondi’s stumbles over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — accumulated even more headlines. Those missteps cost her goodwill from the MAGA grassroots to the West Wing.

A source who worked in the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the early phase of Trump’s current term traced Bondi’s downfall to the high-profile White House event at which social media influencers were handed binders titled, “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”

Those binders garnered blowback even among the president’s supporters because they contained virtually no new revelations.

“She lost the office when she handed out the binders to the influencers,” this source said of the event, which took place little more than a month after Trump returned to power. “You start off in a hole you dug for yourself.”

The former DOJ source claimed that Bondi herself was closely involved in the granular detail of the binders event, including the design of the front cover of the documents. In the aftermath, the attorney general was left dangerously exposed.

Trump’s White House chief of staff Susie Wiles would later say, in an interview published in Vanity Fair, that Bondi’s initial moves on Epstein “completely whiffed” and that she gave the influencers “binders full of nothingness.”

In terms of the bigger picture, Bondi’s comment in a February 2025 Fox News interview that there was an Epstein client list “sitting on my desk right now” lit the fuse for public uproar that exploded when no such disclosure materialized.

A long, politically damaging chain of events for Trump ensued — including him being forced into a last minute U-turn where he acceded to a congressional measure forcing the release of the Epstein files rather than face defeat.

Critics of the Trump-Bondi alliance won’t be shedding any tears about her fate, of course.

From their vantage point, the president has been busily trying to weaponize the justice system to punish his opponents and protect his friends — and Bondi went fully along with that plan until she was thwarted by the courts.

The most notable examples cited are investigations into former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. All three efforts have run aground, at least for the moment, pending appeals.

Last November, a judge dismissed the indictments against Comey and James on the basis that an interim U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, had been appointed unconstitutionally.

Just weeks ago, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg quashed subpoenas issued by the DOJ against Powell. A withering Boasberg in essence accused the government of using the powers of the justice system to pressure Powell to either resign or to lower interest rates in accordance with Trump’s demands.

“The government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime; indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual,” Boasberg wrote.

Harry Litman, who served as a U.S. Attorney during the Clinton administration, said that Bondi’s tenure “will be marked in history as the worst of any Attorney General. She was unbelievably slavish toward Trump. She did everything and anything he wanted, including reprisal prosecutions.”

Litman saw some measure of poetic justice in the attorney general’s eventual defenestration by Trump.

“He just wanted convictions against his enemies, and he couldn’t understand why she couldn’t achieve them,” Litman said.

“He didn’t seem to appreciate either that there is a Grand Jury process or that thin