Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, has been a long-standing Trump loyalist.
April 2, 2026 - By Jeremy Roebuck, Emily Davies and Perry Stein
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he was ousting Pam Bondi as attorney general, saying her chief deputy, Todd Blanche, will temporarily step into the role.
In a social media post about the move, Trump called Bondi “a Great American Patriot” and loyal friend. He praised her tenure leading the Justice Department and said she would be moving to an unspecified “important new job in the private sector.”
Blanche will be taking over as acting attorney general, Trump said. Before being tapped to serve as the Justice Department’s second-ranking official, Blanche had served as Trump’s personal attorney, defending him in multiple criminal cases. Blanche posted on social media Thursday afternoon thanking Trump “for the trust and the opportunity to serve.”
The decision abruptly ends Bondi’s tumultuous tenure in which she transformed the Justice Department into a tool for avenging the president’s grievances but could not escape his persistent frustration with her handling of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and struggles to prosecute the president’s perceived foes.
The move makes Bondi the second Cabinet secretary Trump has ousted in the span of weeks following his decision last month to remove Kristi L. Noem as homeland security secretary.
Trump is eyeing Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, as a possible replacement for Bondi, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.
Bondi, a former state attorney general in Florida, landed the job after Trump’s first pick, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), withdrew from consideration in 2024 amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Gaetz denied the allegations.
A Trump loyalist who had defended him during his first impeachment and later backed his claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, Bondi presented the type of TV-ready persona that the president has appeared drawn to while filling out the Cabinet for his second term.
But in her 14 months at the helm, Trump had repeatedly expressed frustration with Bondi’s pace — and limited success — in overseeing efforts to target his political enemies. And for months, he has fumed as the Justice Department’s handling of files connected to Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019, has divided his own party and remained a persistent point of political pain.
Democrats quickly hailed Bondi’s departure. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) called her “the wrong choice from the start.”
“But the rot at the Department of Justice begins and ends with Donald Trump,” he said in a statement posted on social media. “As long as his focus is on using DOJ as a tool for revenge and not law enforcement, the cover up of the Epstein files, along with the countless other problems at DOJ, will continue.”
Before Thursday, Bondi had succeeded in holding on to her job as the country’s top law enforcement official through public displays of loyalty and her willingness to reshape the Justice Department into an enforcer of the president’s agenda.
While leading the department, she shattered institutional norms that had long kept the agency at arm’s length from the White House and fired scores of attorneys, including many connected to the agency’s prior prosecutions of Trump.
Bondi had been subpoenaed to testify before Congress later this month about the department’s release of millions of pages of material from the Epstein investigation — her third appearance on Capitol Hill to discuss the matter since the Justice Department began publishing the Epstein records last year.
Lawmakers have reprimanded Bondi and her department for their handling of the release, including failing to redact information relating to some victims’ identities. Congress passed a bill last year forcing the Trump administration to release the documents, but the Justice Department did not make public most of its files until well after a December deadline.
Bondi’s previous efforts to beat back criticism from lawmakers — including a bombastic February appearance before the House Judiciary Committed in which she lobbed scripted insults at Democrats and repeatedly praised the president — have done little to quell the controversy. Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to subpoena her last month, surprising committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky).
Democrats on the committee said on social media shortly after Trump’s announcement about Bondi’s ouster that they still expected her to comply with the subpoena and appear for testimony that had been scheduled for April 14.
Still, Trump’s decision to replace Bondi as attorney general was one reached over months.
Some within Trump’s own party had called for her termination as early as February 2025 — the month Bondi was confirmed to lead the Justice Department — after she told Fox News she had a list of Esptein’s clients sitting on her desk that she would soon make public. (The department later said no such list existed.)
She followed up those statements by inviting a group of handpicked influencers to the White House, where she distributed binders labeled “Epstein Files: Phase 1.” The move quickly drew backlash from even some of those invited to the spectacle, who concluded there was virtually no new information included in those files.
Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles — a staunch Bondi ally — told Vanity Fair last year that the attorney general had “completely whiffed” the handling of that initial release.
Facing sustained pressure to disclose more information, the Justice Department launched a new initiative last spring to scour the millions of pages of documents it had amassed over years investigating Epstein. But it said in July, along with the FBI, that it had found no “client list” and no basis to charge anyone else in connection with Epstein’s crimes.
That conclusion sparked outrage among House Republicans on Capitol Hill who mounted a successful campaign late last year to pass legislation compelling the public release of the files.
More recently, some prominent Republicans aimed their fire at the rollout of the release, accusing Justice Department officials of redacting key information to protect prominent people in Epstein’s circle.
Trump, who had a long-standing friendship with Epstein and has said he knew Epstein socially in Palm Beach, Florida, before they had a falling out in the mid-2000s, appears repeatedly in the files — a fact Democrats have pounced on as they’ve joined the Republican push for broader accountability. Trump has not been accused of participating in Epstein’s criminal conduct.
Yet even as that controversy consumed much of the first year of his presidency, Trump was also growing increasingly frustrated on what he viewed as another shortcoming of the Justice Department under Bondi: its limited success in securing convictions against his political enemies.
Last fall, he demanded on social media — in a message directly addressed to “Pam” — that the Justice Department move swiftly to prosecute perceived foes like former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The department later brought criminal charges against both, but those cases were thrown out over issues with the appointment of the U.S. attorney Trump selected to oversee them.
Since then, the Justice Department has opened investigations into other prominent Trump targets including former CIA director John Brennan, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, and a group of Democratic lawmakers who had urged members of the military to refuse illegal orders.
None of those probes have yet to result in charges and, in some cases, grand juries have rejected prosecutors’ efforts to secure indictments.
“We can’t delay any longer,” Trump fumed on social media last fall. “It’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from New York, is seen as another Trump loyalist, but one with a stronger record of success in his oversight of the agency tasked with protecting the environment, a job he has held since the start of the administration.
In the name of boosting U.S. energy production, he has rolled back environmental regulations and pushed to weaken pollution regulations. As a congressman, he prominently defended Trump during his first and second impeachments and voted against certifying the president’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
on April 2, 2026, 2:48 pm
