Gaetz-gate is over. Even the MAGA senators had no appetite to disregard the immorality surrounding this iniquitous man. The 42-year-old former Republican representative, Matt Gaetz, stood accused of some of the very conduct the Justice Department prosecutes. Morality aside, Gaetz was utterly unqualified for the office once held by Robert F. Kennedy, Thomas Clark, and Edwin Stanton. How could Trump ever have considered him for the post? How arrogant did he have to be to think Gaetz, with his baggage, would get through the Senate?
There have been 86 attorneys general of the United States since 1789 the first Judiciary Act established the office. Two have been women.
Most of them were individuals of competence and probity. Four of them, Robert Jackson, Frank Murphy, Harlan Fiske Stone, and Clark, became Supreme Court justices.
What are the qualities that go into a prosecutor? The iconic Robert Jackson epitomized it in a famous speech delivered at the Justice Department to U.S. Attorneys in April 1940:
The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and impossible to define as those that mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law, not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.
Two attorneys general have left office in disgrace for doing the president’s illegal bidding. John Mitchell served 19 months in jail for his role in the Watergate affair. Harry M. Daugherty resigned under fire, took the Fifth Amendment before a federal grand jury, and was indicted and tried twice for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal during the 1920s. The jury disagreed, and he walked out of the courtroom a free but broken man.
With Gaetz pulling out, the president-elect quickly named Pam Bondi, also from Florida. Bondi’s roots with Trump run deep. She had represented him in his first impeachment trial and had been part of his legal team for over a decade. The Florida Attorney General, for two terms, from 2011 to 2019, has the loyalty necessary for appointment to the Trump cabinet. As AG of the third most populous state, she’s got all the background needed to win approval in the Republican-controlled Senate.
In my view, Bondi is a 2020 election denier, which ought to be an absolute bar to holding office under the Constitution. Election denialism is an article of MAGA faith, but it should be a litmus test for the attorney general. How can we expect an election denier to enforce the law based on proven facts and not some “big lie” conspiracy theory?
And there is another shadow over Bondi. Here’s the deal: In June 2018, following a two-year investigation, New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a 40-page verified petition in New York State Supreme Court against Trump, his three oldest children, and the Donald J. Trump Foundation, alleging persistent violations of state and federal law governing charitable foundations. Lawyers call this “charity fraud.” Because her charges might also implicate violations of federal statutes, including federal criminal law, Underwood referred the matter to the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Election Commission for further action. She’s still holding her breath.
The Trumps settled the case with the foundation, agreeing to dissolve under judicial supervision and pay $2 million to a group of nonprofit organizations.
Underwood said that Trump used the charitable foundation as a piggy bank to fund his personal and business expenses and finance his presidential campaign. Trump, the sole signatory of its bank accounts, approved all grants and disbursements.
The complaint alleged, among other things, misuse of charitable assets for Trump’s personal and business benefit, including purchasing a $10,000 portrait of Trump to hang in one of his golf clubs and a second portrait of the Donald. (His former fixer, Michael Cohen. also told Congress he arranged for the 2013 purchase of a third, previously unreported Trump portrait via a straw man bidder involving the foundation’s coffers.)
Also alleged in the complaint was an unlawful $25,000 contribution from the Trump Foundation to Bondi’s reelection campaign. She had been pondering a complaint against Trump for defrauding Sunshine State enrollees at Trump University. Trump initially attempted to conceal the illegal payment to Bondi’s campaign. Only when a watchdog organization uncovered the contribution did Trump refund the foundation and pay a federal excise tax as a penalty. The complaint also alluded to a series of false IRS filings on its Form 990, routinely signed by Trump under penalty of perjury, in which he represented that the foundation had not engaged in political activity.
The gist of the story involved what some characterized as a bribe to get her to drop the investigation into Trump University. At the time, a spokesperson for Bond denied “that a $25,000 donation from Donald Trump is in any way connected to her office’s decision not to pursue action against Trump University, despite dozens of complaints in Florida.”
Bondi had contemplated joining forces with then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, by bringing suit against Trump University. It appeared that 827 Trump University programs had been sold in Florida. Although Bondi’s office had received only one complaint about Trump U. following her appointment in 2011, her predecessor had received 23. Florida has an elderly population, many targeted by deceptive marketing practices. It ranked second among states in purchases of the Trump University product with 950 transactions and third in sales at $3.3 million. Had Trump’s continuing financial support corrupted her judgment? No one can know for sure. But Bondi’s office never interviewed some complainants or investigated if more were in the state.
On September 13, 2013, Bondi’s office told the Orlando Sentinel it had reviewed AG Schneiderman’s lawsuit. The newspaper said the review was to “determine whether Florida should join the multi-state case.” No one knows precisely when Bondi’s internal review of Trump University began or whether Trump was aware of it before the Sentinel piece appeared. Later, Bondi’s office pulled away from the statement released to the Sentinel and denied such consideration. Daily emails leave no room for doubt that Bondi was aware of the allegations in Schneiderman’s complaint during the relevant period.
On September 9, 2013, four days before the Sentinel report, with Bondi’s office reviewing the Florida investigation of the allegations against Trump University, the real estate mogul signed a $25,000 check payable to Bondi’s reelection PAC, “And Justice for All,” on behalf of the Trump Foundation. The law prohibits charitable foundations from contributing to a political campaign. Trump claimed it was all a big mistake and had to reimburse the foundation and pay a $2,500 excise tax as a penalty. The foundation listed the money as going to a Utah charity of the same name, “And Justice for All,” which received nothing.
Trump undoubtedly knew of the Florida investigation when he cut the check to Bondi’s campaign. Surely, he and his lawyers would have anticipated that Bondi might piggyback on the New York suit because Florida had victims. Schneiderman was one thing, but with a Republican attorney general from a megastate charging him with fraud, things would not look so good for the king of Mar-a-Lago. Did the contribution create in Bondi the desired state of mind? Bondi received the $25,000 check on September 17, four days after the Sentinel report. By then, Trump had already contributed $500 to Bondi’s campaign on July 15; Ivanka contributed $500 on September 10.
In October 2013, Bondi’s office told the Miami Herald that she had decided not to join Schneiderman’s suit. Trump said his decision to contribute to Bondi’s campaign had nothing to do with Trump University. You be the judge.
In March 2014, Trump hosted a $3,000-a-plate fundraiser for Bondi at Mar-a-Lago. The fundraiser yielded at least $50,000. It was only five months after she decided not to investigate Trump University. In early 2016, when Florida’s native son Marco Rubio’s foundering presidential was up against the Florida primary, Bondi announced her endorsement of Trump. She would later serve on the 45th president’s transition team on drug abuse.
Bondi was a member of the Trump defense team at his first impeachment trial, involving withholding appropriated funds for Ukraine unless Zelensky furnished political “dirt” on the Bidens.
Most recently, she’s been running the legal phalanx of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. They are the guys that unsuccessfully sued on behalf of a Fulton County, Georgia, Board of Elections member seeking to refuse to certify an election based on a personal suspicion that fraud had occurred. Now, there’s a lawsuit!
Bondi has already expressed a willingness to prosecute Trump’s political enemies. Her receptivity to prosecuting Hillary Clinton emerged during her speech at the Republican National Convention on August 25, 2020, four years after Trump had defeated the former senator and secretary of state.
Bondi looks out into a crowd of Trump supporters, sees a man holding a “lock her up” sign, and says to the crowd, “Stay with me. Lock her up. I love that!”
Even if she can, as U.S. attorney general, competently handle the non-political side of the DOJ—the drugs, sex trafficking, national security cases, bank robberies, management of the Bureau of Prisons, white collar cases, and so on—it’s the possibility of revenge prosecutions that are among the most troubling. What happens when Trump asks her to prosecute Jake Tapper or Liz Cheney? Will she push back? Will she be independent, or will Trump have his vengeful septuagenarian thumb on the scale of justice?
If Bondi is willing to let him interfere with prosecutions, it doesn’t matter how seasoned she is as a state attorney general. She could become a 21st-century Robespierre. He was a lawyer, too. Senators may try to get a commitment to reject White House interference, but she’s smart enough to fudge her answer.
Meanwhile, a confirmation process that’s crazy even by Trump standards, as Heath Brown wrote in these pages this week, is not over.
We’ll find out if the Secretary of Defense nomination of Pete Hegseth, who settled a woman’s claim of assault with a cash payment and an NDA (he denies it), will fly, or that of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who brings his quackery to Health and Human Services. Will Tulsi Gabbard, who has aligned herself with the Putin propagandists, really become the Director of National Intelligence? The elevation of former Trump DOJ apparatchik Matt Whitaker to be ambassador to NATO, despite no experience in foreign affairs, will test the intellectual honesty of the GOP-controlled Senate that must decide his fate.
Another problematic nominee is Linda McMahon, Trump’s designee to run the Education Department, which he vows to shutter. She allegedly lied about having a college degree in education when seeking a position on the Connecticut Board of Education. She reportedly resigned a day before she was going to be exposed in the press. If this is true, it will be yet another test for the Senate. We will see whether one lie doth not a cabinet member make.
There is an unwritten Senate principle that, typically, a president is entitled to his cabinet, even if the senators question the nominee’s approach to the job. Here, however, more is at stake. Trump has said he will use the armed forces domestically to round up and deport illegal immigrants and use the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. These pledges appear unlawful, even unconstitutional. The Senate should be wary of nominees who will robotically implement these policies. None would be confirmed by a Senate acting in the nation’s best interests.
Meanwhile, what is Gaetz’s future? He may want to run for governor of Florida in two years. Or perhaps Ron DeSantis will appoint him to the U.S. Senate pending a special election to fill the vacancy created by the nomination of Rubio as secretary of state. (Trump will not only be the first Floridian president. The state is wildly overrepresented in the top tier of his forthcoming administration, so finding him another job would be entirely possible.) All these contretemps about Gaetz’s unsavory conduct may spark Attorney General Merrick Garland to change his mind and indict him. Or perhaps Trump’s first nominee will mercifully fade away.
