U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi was sworn in at the Justice Department on Wednesday, where the nation’s newly minted top prosecutor is expected to spend her first days dealing with a firestorm of reassignments, lawsuits and resignations from senior law enforcement officials, despite early efforts to urge calm and head off any fears of politicization.
Bondi was sworn in at the Oval Office Wednesday by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in front of an audience packed with friends and family.
Trump congratulated Bondi after the ceremony as “unbelievably fair and unbelievably good.”
“I know I’m supposed to say ‘she’s going to be totally impartial with respect to Democrats,'” Trump told reporters, “and I think she will be as impartial as a person can be.”
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The Justice Department logo and Pam Bondi. (Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images, left, and MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images, right.)
Bondi’s nomination had earned praise both from Republicans and some Democrats in the chamber for her composure and her ability to deftly navigate thorny and politically tricky topics and lines of questioning from some would-be detractors – putting her on a glide path to confirmation in the Republican-majority chamber.
Her nomination had also earned the praise of more than 110 former senior Justice Department officials, including former attorneys general and dozens of Democratic and Republican state attorneys general, who praised her experience and work across party and state lines.
Still, her swearing-in comes at a politically charged time for law enforcement agency. Just hours earlier, two groups of FBI agents filed separate lawsuits Tuesday seeking to block any public identification of employees who worked on Jan. 6 investigations, after the bureau complied with a request from Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to obtain information from thousands of agents, or their…
