Pam Bondi and the Pay-to-Play Justice System

The entire history of the attorney general nominee reveals a comfort with basing prosecutorial discretion on money, power, and proximity to the president.

by David Dayen January 14, 2025

Senate hearings for nominees of Donald Trump’s cabinet begin today, with more than a dozen scheduled this week. All of them are critical in their own way, with millions of lives and trillions of dollars in the balance. But I’m going to focus in on Wednesday’s hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee with attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, who has gotten lost amid some of the more controversial picks (including the original choice for this job, fellow Floridian Matt Gaetz).

Bondi perfectly represents how crime and punishment will likely be handled in the second Trump term. She has no moral qualms with basing her prosecutorial discretion on money, power, and proximity to the president. Indeed, her primary client is less likely to be the people of the United States than it is Donald Trump. In her hands, Trump can use the stick of legal action as an intimidation scheme to get corporate America to do his bidding. Considering the surfeit of cases being left in Bondi’s care from the Biden administration, that’s incredibly dangerous for the rule of law.

According to a great tracker from Public Citizen, there are over 250 active investigations and cases against more than 200 corporations over various forms of misconduct. A good number of these are at the Justice Department, against such corporations as Abbott Labs, Amazon, Boeing, Block, ByteDance (owners of TikTok), private prison firm CoreCivic, CVS, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Northrop Grumman, OceanGate (the company that launched the Titan submersible), Pfizer, Phillips 66, Polymarket, SAP, ServiceNow, SpaceX, Steward Health, Super Micro, Tenet Media, Tether, Tesla, and Toyota. That’s just a partial list.

In addition, there are active investigations or cases from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division against Apple, Google, Nvidia, Live Nation/Ticketmaster, RealPage and several landlords who used the service, UnitedHealth, Visa, and more. Since the election, there have been several dozen merger announcements, many of which will have to be adjudicated by the Justice Department as well. In short, a large chunk and maybe the majority of the economy will be shaped by the decisions of the nation’s top law enforcement agency in the weeks and months to come. And Pam Bondi will have the final word on all of that.
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-01-14-pam-bondi-pay-to-play-justice-system/