Bondi is reminding America why being Trump’s AG is the worst job in Washington

Pam Bondi’s self-inflicted storm over suppressing free speech is showing yet again that serving as Donald Trump’s attorney general is an impossible job.

She spent Tuesday backtracking after threatening Monday to crack down on people deemed guilty of hate speech for celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and warning of investigations into office supply firms if they refused to print posters of the assassinated MAGA hero.

As with her fanning of conspiracy theories over Jeffrey Epstein, Bondi stumbled by apparently seeking to please the president’s hardline supporters but instead inadvertently outraging a good chunk of them.

This may not just be political clumsiness.

To stay in office, Bondi must advance and even get ahead of Trump’s political whims. She’s being careful not to emulate his confirmed first-term attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, who tried to accommodate Trump but were doomed when they ultimately thwarted their boss’s impulses.

Her approach may also have a fatal flaw.

By leaning in the opposite direction, Bondi has twice gotten into trouble by creating expectations on which she could not deliver. In the Epstein case, she fueled excitement among the base of a massive public document dump, then reneged on it. On hate speech, she promised a crackdown that would be a betrayal of conservative ideology — and more importantly is clearly unconstitutional.

‘There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech’

The attorney general’s zeal to go after hate speech came as the administration seeks to punish social media users who celebrated the brutal killing of Kirk, a North Star of Trump’s MAGA movement. No doubt some of this is born from the trauma that rocked the administration after the shocking murder a week ago. But it is also a symptom of a White House constantly grasping for unfettered presidential power to target opponents.

“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech — and there’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” Bondi said Monday on a podcast hosted by former Trump administration aide Katie Miller.

“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Bondi said. “Anything — and that’s across the aisle.”

This enraged conservative commentators because it countermanded decades of campaigning against attempts by liberals to enshrine hate speech in jurisprudence. Bondi’s comments also contradicted settled Supreme Court rulings, including by the late conservative icon Justice Samuel Alito, and even Kirk’s own statements on constitutionally protected speech.

Just as strikingly, Bondi’s apparent willingness to crack down on free speech flouted the policy of the Trump administration itself.

Hours after swearing to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution on January 20, Trump signed an executive order on “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” The text accused the Biden administration of infringing on the constitutionally protected free speech rights of citizens in its attempts to combat “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

The order further stated, “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”

Remarkably, in any move to prosecute hate speech in the wake of the Kirk killing, Bondi would have actively undermined a document that she, as attorney general, was charged with implementing.

Of course, Trump’s view of free speech is selective and often flouts an objective interpretation of the Constitution. On the South Lawn of the White House on Tuesday, he berated ABC journalist Jonathan Karl, who’d pointed out that many of the president’s allies believe hate speech is free speech. “Maybe they’ll have to go after you,” Trump snapped — in a flagrant demonstration of a powerful politician threatening the freedom of the press, another pillar of the First Amendment.

Attempting to defuse the controversy, Bondi told Axios in a Tuesday statement that was authenticated by CNN, “Freedom of speech is sacred in our country, and we will never impede upon that right.” She added, “My intention was to speak about threats of violence that individuals incite against others.”

Prosecuting violent language aimed at convincing someone to break the law is less onerous than any attempt to criminalize hate speech. But it’s also complex, because it involves intent. Whether someone is actively inciting someone else to break the law can be subjective. Many critics have accused the president himself of indulging in incitement, for instance when he told his supporters on January 6, 2021, to “fight like Hell” before the invasion of the Capitol intended to thwart the result of a democratic election.

Trump’s lawyers argued he did not mean to incite others to commit violent crimes because he had earlier in his speech urged supporters to march in a “peaceful and patriotic” manner. The claims were not tested at trial since the federal election interference case ended when Trump won the 2024 election.

Bondi’s political Achilles’ heel

Bondi might have abandoned hate speech cases after her latest political tangle. But the administration is nevertheless vowing to target liberal groups that it claims are financing and encouraging incitement against conservatives. There is no division inside MAGA on that goal.

She’ll likely be able to overcome any political damage by doubling down on such a crackdown, even if it brings its own legal and constitutional concerns.

And so far, there’s no sign she’s testing the patience of Trump and his team. She got the job as a second choice — after Trump’s first pick, former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration following a thwarted confirmation fight colored by allegations of sexual misconduct in an episode that only added to a sense that the AG’s job in a Trump administration was cursed.

Bondi was considered a steadier hand than Gaetz. But unlike her first-term predecessors, she’s not an outsider. She’s in the front rank of MAGA personalities considered ultra-loyal to the president. She’s often seen with Trump — for instance in the Oval Office on Monday. Her obsequious demonstrations of loyalty at Cabinet meetings epitomize her obliteration of the firewall between the White House and the Justice Department on behalf of a president who sees the DOJ as a personal law firm.

And CNN reported in August that after going into media exile following criticism of her handling of the Epstein matter, Bondi had reasserted control of the DOJ and the FBI and was resuming her regular appearances on conservative media.

But if Bondi has an Achilles’ heel, it’s in her political touch.

She made the controversy over Trump’s past friendship with Epstein much worse.

There’s no evidence of wrongdoing by the president related to his relationship with the late convicted sex offender. But Bondi’s promise of massive disclosures of Epstein’s files and claim that she had his client list on her desk gave the scandal new momentum.

Then, when she and FBI Director Kash Patel later released a statement saying no Epstein client list existed and that no further disclosure were warranted, they sent conspiracy theories into overdrive and created a political firestorm that Trump has yet to extinguish. On Tuesday, for instance, protesters projected images of the president on the exterior walls of Windsor Castle outside London, where he will arrive on Wednesday during his state visit.

Bondi’s continued good political standing may depend on the Epstein matter fading fast. But serving as attorney general for a president as capricious as Trump will always be taxing.

After all, Sessions and Barr both sought to deliver on the president’s personal and political goals but still got on the wrong side of him. Sessions, a former Alabama senator, was an early ideological soul mate for Trump on the issue of immigration crackdowns. And Barr doused much of the impact of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

But both men ultimately prioritized the law and the safeguarding of their personal integrity ahead of appeasing the president. Sessions never recovered from recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Barr’s split happened when he said there was no widespread evidence of election fraud in 2020.

So far, Bondi taking the opposite approach, rarely standing in the way of a president who believes he has unlimited power. But if her sometimes-shaky political instincts don’t loosen her grip, a moment may come, sooner or later, when even she faces the same fateful choice.

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