MIAMI — The day before Florida’s 2016 presidential primary, the state attorney general, Pam Bondi, surprised her fellow Republicans and endorsed Donald Trump at a rally in Tampa, her hometown.
Her first choice, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, had recently dropped out. Sen. Marco Rubio, another Floridian, remained in the race, though just barely. Few big-name Republicans in the state, and none as high-ranking as Bondi, had yet backed Trump.
“I kept my word to Jeb and the day Jeb got out of the race, I committed to Donald Trump,” she said in a statement.
In him, Bondi saw a bit of herself: an outsider with no experience in elective office. She first won the state attorney general’s race in 2010, during the Tea Party wave that catapulted novice Republican candidates like her into power.
By 2016, she was part of the state’s political establishment. But the party, she saw, was on the cusp of another pivotal moment — and her foresight then is responsible now for Trump’s decision to pick her to lead the Justice Department, as U.S. attorney general.
“Something that you don’t forget is when someone comes and gets behind you early in a situation when it’s not popular,” said Adam Goodman, a Tampa political consultant who has advised Bondi since recruiting her to run in 2010.
Over the past eight years, as Florida became Trump’s home, a cradle of right-wing politics and a solidly Republican state, Bondi went from being a traditional Republican to a Trump loyalist. Acting as confidant, impeachment lawyer and adviser, she ascended in the president-elect’s inner circle thanks to the combination of charm, savvy and a light touch that characterized her career as a telegenic prosecutor and a politician.
Florida is home to every brand of Trump Republican, including flamethrowers like former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was forced to withdraw as Trump’s first choice for attorney general because of scandal. But perhaps no one better reflects the political evolution of the state and its once-establishment leaders than Bondi, 59, whose small risk in endorsing Trump early in 2016 paid off in a big way, making her the relatively safe pick after Gaetz’s selection collapsed.
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Dave Aronberg, the Democratic state attorney in Palm Beach County, who previously worked under Bondi for two years as her drug czar in the attorney general’s office, said that while their politics differ, he felt relieved that Trump had picked her.
“She is very loyal to him,” he said. “I don’t believe, however, that she would intentionally violate the law to carry out any policy.”
“She’s a 20-year prosecutor whose arguments are always tethered to the law,” he added. “She’s not going to walk Anthony Fauci in an orange jumpsuit just to make headlines.”
Trump’s critics, however, are worried that her record of fealty to Trump — she worked on the defense team for his first impeachment trial and supported his claims of election fraud in 2020 — signals that the Justice Department’s independence would be compromised.
Bondi’s detractors have also accused her of being soft on her political donors, including Trump. Her office decided in 2013 not to formally investigate fraud claims involving Trump University shortly after Trump’s family foundation contributed $25,000 to a political action committee associated with Bondi. A state ethics panel concluded that there was no probable cause that Bondi had violated any state laws.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition team repeated a statement calling the Trump University incident “old, discredited news” and did not respond to other questions about Bondi’s life and career. He declined to make her available for an interview.
Early in Bondi’s tenure, her office forced out two investigators who had built a case against a company that helped lenders fraudulently foreclose on homeowners. The company under investigation had contributed to Bondi’s 2010 campaign. An inspector general’s report concluded that no one in the state attorney general’s office had violated any laws or rules. The ousted investigators declined to comment.
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The controversies did little to slow Bondi’s rise. She won reelection by 13 percentage points in 2014, and after leaving office in 2019, she joined Ballard Partners, a powerhouse lobbying firm where she worked with Amazon, Uber and the Qatari government. Even some of her former Democratic opponents describe her as so amiable that they remain in touch.
“Something my dad taught me: Never burn bridges,” Bondi said in 2013 at a commencement address at her alma mater, Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Florida.
Bondi, a fourth-generation Floridian, was born in 1965 and is the oldest of three children to Patsy and Joseph C. Bondi Jr. Her father was an educator and served in the mid-70s as mayor of Temple Terrace, Florida, a suburb of Tampa where Pam Bondi grew up.
She graduated from the University of Florida before heading to Stetson, a small, private law school whose alumni include numerous Florida jurists and politicians. From Stetson, she joined the state attorney’s office in Tampa’s Hillsborough County, in what would become an 18-year career as a local prosecutor that included trying capital murder cases.
Bondi was known as an effective prosecutor. “Juries loved her,” said Nicholas B. Cox, who was Bondi’s boss for five or six years as they tried homicide cases, adding that her affable personality helped win over jurors. (When Bondi became attorney general, she hired Cox as statewide prosecutor, a position he still holds.)
Billy Howard, a lawyer who dated Bondi two decades ago, said she was such a force in the courtroom that he nicknamed her the “Paminator.”
Though she never ran for Hillsborough’s top prosecutor job of state attorney, she became the face of the office, frequently appearing on CNN and Fox News as a legal analyst. In Tampa’s social circles, where Bondi was well known, some speculated that she might jump full-time to cable television.
Instead, Bondi ran for state attorney general in 2010, winning a Republican primary against the lieutenant governor and a state lawmaker by campaigning as an outsider with real-world experience.
In the general election, Bondi defeated Dan Gelber, then a Democratic state senator, by 13 points. Gelber remained on good terms with Bondi and said he would occasionally hear from her when he was mayor of Miami Beach.
“She would text me whenever she saw me on Fox News, telling me to get off her channel,” he said.
As Florida’s first female attorney general, Bondi opposed same-sex marriage and the legalization of medical marijuana. She was part of a lawsuit to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which gave her a national platform within the Republican Party. Perhaps most notably, she led the effort to shut down clinics known as pill mills that illegally sold prescription drugs.
In 2014, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican who worked closely with Bondi, rescheduled an execution at Bondi’s request. Unbeknown to Scott, she had sought the delay to hold a reelection campaign fundraiser. Bondi later said doing so had been a mistake.
During her 2010 campaign, the news media extensively covered a 16-month custody fight over a St. Bernard dog that she had adopted from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Bondi tried to keep the dog after its original owners, Dorreen and Steven Couture, surfaced and said they wanted him back. The two sides settled before trial, and Bondi returned the dog.
Reached by phone this week, Steven Couture declined to comment on the custody battle, simply saying, “you can’t hold grudges for 20 years,” he said.
Among state attorneys general, Bondi was considered close to local police departments and easy to work with, said Luther Strange, the former Republican attorney general of Alabama. She was friendly with Beau Biden, President Joe Biden’s son who was then the Democratic attorney general of Delaware, Strange said.
“She was very well liked and had a very cordial way of working with folks,” Strange said. That ability to collaborate, and her background as a prosecutor, would serve her well as U.S. attorney general, he added.
“You have to understand the tremendous power that prosecutors hold,” he said, “and you want someone in that role who respects that. And I think she does.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2024 The New York Times
