Trump fired Bondi because she wasn't corrupt enough: expert

President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi not because she did her job poorly (although she did), but because she was insufficiently corrupt.

At least that is the claim made by expert legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote for The New York Times on Thursday that Trump fired Bondi for a “bad” reason, namely her failure to effectively abuse her office to prosecute his political enemies. In September he blasted her publicly for failing to get convictions against former F.B.I. director James Comey, Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, and The Daily Mail reported that Thursday he was also upset she notified Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), with whom she has a friendly relationship, about an impending investigation into his alleged relationship with an accused Chinese spy.

The Daily Mail also reported that Bondi "begged" to keep her job in a "dramatic" scene in the White House.

“The fact that Ms. Bondi has failed in these abusive prosecutorial efforts is cause for relief, not dismissal,” Toobin wrote of Trump’s dissatisfaction with Bondi’s efforts in that regard. “It’s the rest of her record that has turned the Justice Department into an oxymoron that will take years, if not decades, to fix.” Toobin pointed out that under Bondi “case loads are down because of her failure to prosecute violent criminals” and she has sent so many transparently political prosecutions to judges that he has destroyed their ability to be presumed to be of good faith before the bar.

“With the midterms looming, President Trump may have decided to replace his attorney general while his party still controls the Senate,” Toobin concluded. “But whomever he chooses, the future at the Justice Department looks like more of the same, and probably worse.”

According to CNN, the writing was on the wall for Bondi as early as Monday, when the president began making private calls about the wisdom of firing her. While most of his support network said he should do so, experts suspect he will have trouble finding a replacement willing to compromise their credibility on his behalf as Bondi has done. Indeed, Bondi’s performance on the job was so poor that former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Elie Honig called her an “abject failure” while speaking with CNN.

"I think Pam Bondi's legacy as an attorney general will be as an abject failure. And I think there's broad agreement on that. Start with the Epstein files," Honig said, referring to Bondi’s mismanagement of the release of files pertaining to the late child sex trafficker and Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein.

"Everyone on both sides of the aisle agrees that she badly mishandled the Epstein files,” Honig said. “As Evan [Pérez] and Jeff [Zeleny] just noted, she was the one who brought this back to the fore by making these grand promises about disclosing the Epstein files that ultimately she could not fulfill.”

Honig added, "When Congress passed a law requiring the DOJ to produce the Epstein files, she completely botched it. DOJ acted more than a month late. They over-redacted the names that should not have been taken out. They redacted. They left victim information there. When she testified about this a month or so ago in front of Congress, it was an utter disaster. She embarrassed herself.”

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