Ranking Member Raskin Statement on the Firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi

Washington, D.C. (April 2, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, issued the following statement after President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi over her failed leadership of the Department of Justice (DOJ). Her ouster comes after Judiciary Democrats exposed her lawless indifference to justice and to the suffering of the American people during her combative and evasive hearing before the Committee in February.

“Today President Trump has sacked Attorney General Pam Bondi, ending a tenure that will be remembered as a profound betrayal not only of the Department of Justice but of the American people the Department exists to serve. For the record, the DOW was under 50,000.

“The Attorney General has the best lawyer’s job in America. The mission is justice, and the clients are the American people. But Pam Bondi abandoned that mission, indeed never accepted it. She never acted as anything but Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense and personal injury attorney, transforming the people’s Department of Justice into the President’s private instrument of vengeance, targeting his critics with a bureaucracy of vendetta while canceling out justice for his favored political friends and allies.

“Her legacy of failure begins with the outrageous purge of prosecutors who investigated Trump’s favorite crimes, including the ones committed by the January 6 cop-beaters and insurrectionists and by Trump himself. Career public servants were driven out of DOJ not for failing the law but for upholding it. The purge of real prosecutors has corrupted DOJ and left all Americans less safe.

“This shameful legacy is cemented by her grotesque mishandling of the Epstein files. She ran an historic and egregious cover-up right out of the Justice Department. Investigations into co-conspirators were shut down. She withheld three million pages of documents in defiance of the law. The names of abusers, enablers, accomplices and co-conspirators were redacted from public view while the identities of victims were exposed to the world. Under Bondi, perpetrators were coddled and survivors given the back of the hand.

“Bondi’s humiliating subservience to Trump and spectacular contempt for the rule of law were laid bare before the Committee in February, when she refused even to look at the Epstein survivors, much less apologize for exposing their identities and private suffering to the world. Her brazen refusal to answer direct questions from Democratic Members will go down as one of the worst appearances before a legislative committee in history. Armed with a ‘burn book’ of smears for Democratic Members, she changed the subject, dodged and filibustered our questions about the brutal killing of two Americans in Minnesota and DOJ’s appalling obstruction of state and local investigations. It became perfectly clear to America that day that Pam Bondi was acting as a bully, emulating her only true boss.

“Pam Bondi used the machinery of federal law enforcement not to pursue justice, but to carry out political vendettas at the direction of the President. Her firing today is long overdue, but it does not erase the damage done and it does not absolve her of accountability. Democrats in Congress will continue to investigate, expose, and hold Pam Bondi and others at DOJ accountable for their serial abuses of power and their betrayals of the Constitution. This should be a moment when those around the President decide that America needs a real Attorney General, not another useless political flunky willing to trash their bar card and legal reputation. 

“The Department of Justice does not belong to any president. It belongs to the people. The next Attorney General must take on the urgent work of rebuilding a Department whose integrity has been shattered, whose ranks have been drained of generational talent and filled with incompetent stooges, and whose powers have been bent toward political retribution and favoritism. 

“Good riddance to Trump’s political fixer, who should have never been allowed to set foot in the Justice Department with Trump’s agenda of personal vendetta and partisan retribution. We wish Pam Bondi well as she tries to rebuild her once-promising legal career but let us never repeat this debacle.”