Pam Bondi is out as attorney general, President Trump announced Thursday, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as acting attorney general.
“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump said in a statement on Truth Social. “Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.”
“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, and our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General,” he added.
The announcement came just one day after Bondi was at the White House to attend Trump’s address to the nation on the Iran war. She had also accompanied Trump to the Supreme Court to watch oral arguments in a birthright citizenship case.
During his second term, the president has been hesitant to oust senior officials in an effort to avoid creating drama that Democrats and the media can feed on. But reporting suggests that Trump had grown frustrated with Bondi over both her handling of the Epstein files, and her failure to show any meaningful progress in legal cases against his opponents, including former FBI director James Comey.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair in an interview published late last year that Bondi had “completely whiffed” the DOJ’s release of the files related to the deceased sex trafficker, which became a major source of concern for the president’s base.
Trump had vowed on the campaign trail in 2024 to release Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list” if Trump were reelected. He tasked Bondi with handling the release, and Bondi told Fox News in early 2025 that the list of Epstein’s “clients” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”
Trump’s supporters were outraged months later when a memo from the DOJ and FBI said no such list existed. That memo, and the ensuing backlash, led Congress to pass a law in November compelling the DOJ to release the files related to its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, many of whom were prominent, wealthy individuals in several sectors of American life, including politics, business, and media.
“First she gave them binders full of nothingness,” Wiles said after Bondi invited right-wing influencers to the White House and presented them with binders titled, “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”
“And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk,” Wiles told Vanity Fair. “There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
Since Congress passed its bill, the DOJ has released more than 3 million files from its investigation into the billionaire pedophile, who died by suicide while awaiting trial on charges of sex-trafficking girls and women. The files have included FBI interviews with victims, drafts of charging documents, internal memos, and thousands of photos and videos.
Trump is now considering Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin as a potential replacement for Bondi, according to reports from several media outlets, including Fox News and the New York Times.
The president is likely to name a successor that will be easy to confirm in the Senate, as he looks to avoid a repeat of his controversial Matt Gaetz nomination in 2024. Gaetz, then a congressman from Florida, ultimately withdrew his name from consideration to become attorney general, saying that an Ethics Committee investigation into allegations that he’d paid underage women for sex had become too much of a distraction for the then-incoming Trump administration.
While Trump has largely tried to keep his personnel decisions drama-free during his second term, he also recently fired Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversaw a tumultuous period for the agency that included two highly scrutinized agent-involved shootings in Minnesota. Senator Markwayne Mullin was recently confirmed by the Senate as her replacement.