Trump Sacks Attorney General, Pam Bondi, Replaces Her with Ex-personal Lawyer

• Action allegedly result of slowdown in prosecution of political opponents 

•US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, ousts Army Chief of Staff

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

US President Donald Trump fired his Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday and named his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, to serve as the acting chief of the Justice Department.

The move, which the Republican president announced in a social media post, comes amid criticism of Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files and her failure to successfully prosecute several perceived Trump political foes, a EuroNews report said.

“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown on crime across our country,” Trump stated.

Bondi “will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector to be announced at a date in the near future,” the president said, and will be replaced on an interim basis by Blanche.

Bondi has been a staunch ally of the president but has drawn fire from some Trump supporters for her handling of the release of the Justice Department files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.

The Epstein affair has been a major political liability for Trump, who was a longtime friend of the disgraced financier.

Bondi has also reportedly drawn Trump’s ire by falling short with efforts to prosecute perceived Trump opponents such as former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

According to The New York Times, Trump may name former Republican congressman Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to be the next attorney general.

In the meantime, the post will be filled by Blanche, who was one of the personal lawyers who defended Trump in the multiple criminal cases he faced after he left the White House in 2021.

Bondi’s ouster comes nearly a month after Trump fired Kristi Noem as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.

Democratic lawmakers welcomed Bondi’s firing. “Good riddance,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

“Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice became a cesspool of corruption,” Warren said. “Bondi will be remembered for blocking the release of the Epstein files (and) weaponising the DOJ to go after Trump’s political opponents.”

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said Bondi’s “botched handling of the Epstein files” had “denied victims transparency and further undermined trust in our justice system.”

“Americans deserve a Justice Department that is actually focused on delivering justice, not on serving a president’s agenda of personal and political self-interest,” Warner said.

Bondi joined Trump’s legal team during his first term impeachment trial, in which he was alleged to have pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to find political dirt on Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump was impeached by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives but acquitted by the Republican-majority Senate. Bondi helped push Trump’s false claims of voter fraud after he lost the 2020 election to Biden.

She made television appearances on behalf of Trump and pushed to delegitimise vote counting in battleground states as part of the push by the former president to overturn the results of the vote.

Bondi also criticised the criminal cases brought against Trump, appearing in solidarity at his New York trial, where he was convicted of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.

Bondi served as a prosecutor for 18 years before being elected Florida’s attorney general in 2010, the first woman to hold the post. She was re-elected to a second term in 2014.

Meanwhile, Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has asked the Army’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Randy George, to step down from the post and retire immediately, a Pentagon official told The Hill on Thursday.

The Army did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment. The Pentagon confirmed George’s retirement, who served as the Army’s 41st chief of staff.

“The Department of War is grateful for General George’s decades of service to our nation. We wish him well in his retirement,” Pentagon chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in a statement.

George assumed the role, which is typically a four-year post, in September 2023 after being confirmed by the Senate; he had been serving as the Army’s vice chief of staff. George, a career infantry officer who graduated from West Point, was nominated by former President Biden.

Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has fired more than a dozen senior military officers, including the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife, the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse and Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

The ouster of George marks another example of tension between the Pentagon head and the Army’s leadership. Hegseth ordered Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to remove one of his top advisers, Col. David Butler, who was Gen. Mark Milley’s spokesperson when he was chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in February.

On Tuesday, Hegseth said the Army crew that flew two AH 64 Apache helicopters near Kid Rock’s Nashville home will not face suspension and ended the investigation into the service members. Earlier that day, the crew members were suspended by the Army and the service opened an investigation into the incident.

George was commissioned from the US Military Academy as an infantry officer in 1988 and deployed in support of Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. George was the Army’s chief of staff from 2022 to 2023.

The Army’s current vice chief of staff is Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was previously Hegseth’s military aide.

“General LaNeve — a generational leader — will help ensure the Army revives the warrior ethos, rebuilds for the modern battlefield and deters our enemies around the world,” Hegseth said of LaNeve in January.