Swapping Bondi For Gaetz Eases Fears At Justice Department, But Only A Little

Career lawyers throughout the Justice Department let out a collective sigh of relief when they learned that former Rep. Matt Gaetz would not be their boss. But his withdrawal as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general pick only slightly dissipated the tense and unsettled atmosphere that has prevailed in the department since Trump’s victory earlier this month.

“There are huge amounts of relief among career lawyers and the FBI that Gaetz is no longer in contention,” one former career DOJ official said Friday.

Trump’s selection of former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as his new attorney general nominee was perceived by many DOJ veterans as less of a norm-shattering, unorthodox, in-your-face choice than Gaetz, a bellicose MAGA provocateur who was investigated by the department for years over sex-trafficking allegations without any charges being filed.

“In terms of Bondi, people haven’t freaked out like they did over Gaetz,” a career DOJ lawyer said Friday. “It doesn’t seem surprising to anybody. She’s obviously a loyalist, which makes the choice absurd, but we’ve expected that. … It definitely lacks the shock factor that Gaetz caused.”

While nearly everyone at the Justice Department knew about Gaetz from the sensational federal criminal investigation and his highly publicized role in forcing Speaker Kevin McCarthy out of his post last year, Bondi is less familiar.

Current and former DOJ employees, granted anonymity to speak freely about internal discussions at the department, said they knew little about Bondi’s substantive work during eight years as Florida’s top law enforcement official. However, many agreed that experience seemed to give her the basic qualifications for the job, especially when compared to Gaetz, who only practiced law for a couple of years before getting into politics.

“On a superficial level, yeah, she’s qualified,” the current DOJ attorney said.

However, some Justice Department veterans expressed concern that Bondi might effectively be Gaetz without the baggage — that she could serve as a vehicle to carry out Trump’s stated desire to target his perceived enemies inside and outside the department, without the distracting allegations of personal misconduct Gaetz faced.

“So is she going to just be a somewhat more palatable, esthetically more enhanced version of Gaetz or something else?” said the former prosecutor. “We won't know until she's in the job.”

Any immediate impact of the shift from Gaetz to Bondi on the mood of the department’s staff was hard to discern. Hallways and offices at “Main Justice” were unusually quiet Friday, likely a combination of dismal weather in Washington, the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday next week and many government workers still opting for remote work, particularly just before and after the weekend.

Attorney General Merrick Garland had no events on his public schedule Friday, but the presence of a sentry near his office indicated he was at work. Earlier this week, he seemed to be steeling DOJ’s career lawyers for future tumult by praising them as “the institutional backbone” and “the heart and soul of the department.”

Some lawyers who have expressed concern about the impact Trump’s return will have on the Justice Department said Friday they were looking beyond the AG pick to the president-elect’s other personnel choices. Those could be important signals about whether the changes at DOJ will be large-scale and destabilizing or more like the reprioritizing that typically occurs when a president of a different party than his predecessor takes over the White House, those attorneys said.

In the wake of the replacement of Gaetz by Bondi, Trump’s choices for FBI posts and for prominent U.S. attorney positions are going to be heavily scrutinized and are now the subject of lobbying by Trump supporters angry that Gaetz was dropped.

On Friday morning, Trump seemed to bend to that constituency when his close aide Dan Scavino Jr. posted on social media that former Rep. Mike Rogers — who’d been campaigning for the job of FBI director on Fox News earlier in the day — was never in the running. Among Trump backers who want radical changes at DOJ and FBI, Rogers had been viewed suspiciously as an establishment pick. Many in that camp are pushing for Trump to instead pick Kash Patel, a former prosecutor and National Security Council aide.

And one prominent advocate for defendants charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, writer Julie Kelly, said Friday she wants Trump to name a U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who will repudiate the aggressive approach that office has taken in the more than 1,500 criminal cases filed over that day’s events.

“The corrupt rot of the DOJ is not necessarily at main Justice but festers in the DC US Attorney's office, which carried out each political prosecution,” Kelly wrote on X. “The incoming DC US Attorney must investigate what happened in that office and pursue charges against every official including assistant US attorneys responsible for these abusive, selective, and destructive prosecutions. To me, that appointment is as important if not more so than attorney general.”

But the former career prosecutor said that office and other major federal prosecutors’ offices in places like Los Angeles and Miami could be thrown into turmoil if Trump nominates U.S. attorneys seen as overtly political. Trump has already tapped former SEC Chair Jay Clayton to lead the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan, but he’s seen as a relatively establishment figure.

“That's also going to be a barometer, if he just appoints political people to these jobs who get confirmed,” the ex-official said. “That's gonna be a real problem for the rank-and-file.”