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Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, April 3rd, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show learning that, according to Bloomberg News, President Donald Trump will announce a budget today with a massive buildup in defense spending, courtesy of cuts to domestic programs. Because when your approval is below 40%, why not try to go lower? [music break] On today’s show, the world scrambles to figure out how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And a poll finds people glued to social media are less likely to think democracy is the best form of government. I wonder which right-wing influencer told them that. But let’s start with the exit of Attorney General Pam Bondi. Yes, Pam Bondi, Epstein Binder’s enthusiast and Trump-toady, is out of a job. After multiple media reports stating she was headed for the green pastures of somewhere else. President Trump officially announced her departure on Truth Social Thursday. He wrote in part, quote, “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.” Which means that unlike former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Bondi didn’t get another administration position. Cold. And that’s after she went to the mat for Trump over the Epstein files during a House Judiciary Committee meeting in February. 

[clip of Pam Bondi] This administration released over three million pages of documents, over three million, and Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents. He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history. And none of them, none of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years, one word about Jeffrey Epstein. How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump, the DOW, the DOW right now is over, the DOW is over $50,000. I don’t know why you’re laughing. You’re a great stock trader as I hear Raskin. 

Jane Coaston: Well, on Thursday, the DOW was at around 46,000. Maybe that’s why she got fired? So why is Bondi getting pushed out of her role as Attorney General? Was it the Epstein files debacle or her inability to successfully prosecute Trump’s enemies? To find out, I spoke with Ryan Barber. He’s a reporter covering the Justice Department for the Wall Street Journal. We connected on Thursday afternoon after Trump’s announcement. Ryan, welcome to What a Day. 

Ryan Barber: Thanks so much for having me. 

Jane Coaston: Now there have been reports that Trump has been unhappy with Pam Bondi for a while. What do you think was the final straw here? 

Ryan Barber: So that’s actually the big mystery hanging over today. Um. When we last heard that President Trump was becoming more vocal in venting his frustrations, um it was actually back in like the December, January time frame where we were coming off of these prosecutions of his perceived adversaries, namely former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James. Those cases had just been dismissed with the judge ruling that the prosecutor behind them was installed improperly. And then prosecutors kind of went flailing about, trying twice, failing twice to revive at least the case against Letitia James. So that gave us kind of a more recent headline, something in the news about setbacks that DOJ was facing on something that was a priority for President Trump. Um. You know, he’s of course also wanted more scrutiny of the 2020 election and um a lot of people in the conservative world, Trump allies have said, where are the special councils to be deputized, to look into these things? In this timeframe, there’s a little, there is not so much that’s obvious um to be aggravating him anew. And in fact, we’re hearing from some people today that Bondi felt actually on relatively stable footing, um all things being relative given the given the tumultuous year that we’ve had at least covering the Justice Department, let alone in her case leading it. 

Jane Coaston: Bondi is the second Trump cabinet member to go this term, at least. But like, there are certainly other people who have been getting negative press. I’m thinking of FBI Director Kash Patel, or my personal favorite, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. So why did Bondi get the ax, specifically? Like, Chavez-DeRemer’s husband isn’t allowed in the Department of Labor building. 

Ryan Barber: I think it’s truly a testament to how near and dear the Justice Department and what the Justice Department can do is to Trump’s heart this time around. Um. One thing that we’ve been hearing from many people in and outside the administration is what a difference two indictments make. He faced two different federal cases from the Justice department in the time that he was outside of the White House. And that just left this impression that he needed this retribution against people he perceived as behind a lot of those legal troubles. And the first place to look was the Justice Department, where we saw the past year really being marked by so many firings, so many forced resignations, other other resignations. There really has been an exodus that some today are referring to as a purge. Um. But we were just seeing it as this place where he had these years to develop a grievance against. It was an agency that really sat near, if not at the top of the list. Um as one that was catching his interest that he was following that he wanted deliverables out of 

Jane Coaston: Okay, Trump is the count of Monte Cristo, I get it. But as you mentioned, Bondi attempted to prosecute Trump’s enemies. But you reported with your colleagues that Trump basically felt like she wasn’t doing it well enough. But I have to ask, and this is a weird question, could she have actually done the thing that he wanted her to do? Or is this a situation of Trump being upset that his administration cannot prosecute people without legitimate cases? 

Ryan Barber: It is the best possible question today and Bondi’s allies today are are singing it from the top of their lungs, which is there is no attorney general that could have threaded this needle. Um you know at the end of the day, um the Justice Department cannot act unilaterally when it wants to bring cases. It needs to seek indictments with sign-off from everyday citizens and paneled on grand juries. It needs to get through judges who review motions to dismiss. And review legal arguments for why cases shouldn’t proceed. Um. And a lot of those steps uh trip them up along the way, um you know preventing them from acting on their desires, even when they did, in fact, go forward, albeit perhaps a little more slowly than than the president would have desired. 

Jane Coaston: I’ve been thinking a lot today about the 10 years of Trump’s previous attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr. Is the way Trump dealt with Bondi different? I’m thinking about that Truth Social post that was likely supposed to be a DM, you know, where he’s saying, Pam, what about Comey? What about Adam Shifty Schiff? What’s happening? Nothing’s being done. Is this just how he’s been the whole time or did he think Bondi was specifically in her job to do his bidding? 

Ryan Barber: What you just said answers it, which is um the first time around, he not only had attorneys general who were more willing to say no in the case of Jeff Sessions, the big highlight there was his recusal from the Russia investigation, letting the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein effectively be the attorney general for the purpose of it, appoint special counsel Robert Mueller. With Bill Barr, we saw we saw him being public about a lack of evidence of fraud um in the election that Trump lost. Now comes Trump administration number two, um and who does he pick to lead the Justice Department, not just in the number one spot, but in the number two spot are two former personal lawyers of his. They say personnel is policy, and that’s really game set match in terms of what you need to understand about what he was looking for in his Justice Department leadership, which were gonna be people who were more responsive to him, people who are willing to pick up the phone, act on what he wanted, and pick up the phone in the first place, as opposed to adhering to these more customary traditional safeguards where, yes, the president can set broad setting policies for law enforcement, but doesn’t roll up his sleeves and get down in the nitty gritty of individual cases, certainly not calling up cases against against political adversaries that he’s singling out in a social media post that he intends as a private message. 

Jane Coaston: I think that that gets to my next question, which is in his Truth Social, announcing Bondi’s exit to private employment. Trump named Bondi’s immediate successor, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, as you mentioned, a former Trump attorney. But have there been any rumblings of who Trump may want to take over officially? 

Ryan Barber: Yeah, there have been rumblings that his current EPA head, Lee Zeldin, is somebody that he has discussed and–

Jane Coaston: Why? 

Ryan Barber: [laugh] A very good question that we are seeking the answer to. You know, he has conservative bona fides. He came up certainly in Republican political circles. You don’t you know reach such a high level role in the Trump administration, especially the second time around without doing so. But it does yeah raise raise some questions that we’re certainly keenly interested in. And it really is an open question about how long Todd Blanche, again, his former personal criminal defense lawyer, um how long he has in the seat and how willing Trump is to kind of, I don’t want to say endure, but to almost tolerate that continuity from the the Pam Bondi tenure that he’s just ended because in a lot of ways, Todd Blanche really owns a lot of what’s happened this year. They have served concurrently. He has been the number two to her number one. So it’s a it’s an open question. One of the many open questions we have just hours after this ouster became official. 

Jane Coaston: I think that the thing I was seeing, you know, I spend a lot of time reading conservative and right-wing media and they’ve been out on Bondi since the Epstein binders debacle. So we have to talk about the Epstein files. 

Ryan Barber: Of course. 

Jane Coaston: Her decision to give a bunch of right-wing influencers copies of the Epstein files, which turned out to already be publicly available, that turned off a bunch of people who tweet a lot. But the Epstein files themselves put Bondi in hot water, not just with Trump’s base, but with pretty much everyone. One, how much of a role do you think the Epstein files played in this firing, um if any? And two, will her firing make it easier for Congress to force her to testify about the files? We’ve already seen a tweet from Florida Democratic Representative Maxwell Frost saying that she still has to go before Congress. Is that more likely to happen now? 

Ryan Barber: So the binder episode uh to begin this lengthy saga, it is now referred to by some in the White House as the original sin. It was a really early sign of a problem that would really plague Pam Bondi, who came into the job as a communicator. She kind of rose up in in Florida’s political circles as a prosecutor who was going on TV and communicating, kind of almost being that office’s spokesperson. So she came in as somebody who was supposed to be comfortable on television. And communicating in that format. But what the White House saw time and again was a communication style that tended to over promise and under deliver with key segments of the MAGA base, which it turned out the administration had very much miscalculated in terms of how much they would care about the Epstein matter in the first place. I mean, the White house, DOJ, everybody was kind of, I think a little surprised by how difficult it was to appease this or or satisfy this appetite for more information um about this deceased sex offender. You know after the Binders episode, it was you know White House aides pulled her aside, they said, hey, this is really not helpful. We really don’t want to be stoking the embers of attention on this. We don’t need these MAGA influencers coming over here looking at Binders, certainly without much notice to us. And then what happened from there were just continued questions. DOJ not wanting to release more, Congress forcing them to do so, and then we saw the rollout of those, the public release of those files get bungled in a big way with uh you know a lot of identifying information about victims, a lot of photographs being made public when they should have been redacted, and a lot of redactions creating the, you know, seeming to protect the powerful. And of course the whole point here is in part whether the government has been protecting these powerful people. So it just created a complete mess um optically for everyone not to mention tangibly for Epstein’s victims. As for her deposition, this is a little bit of an open question about whether she is now still on the hook to appear for the April 14th deposition. I think a lot of people are thinking that she may point to this to try to delay her questioning, but as as you just mentioned about about Congressman Frost, a lot of people are interested in her not for her official capacity. They don’t want just any attorney general to sit in the chair and answer questions under oath. They want the one who was in charge of the Justice Department at the relevant time. Time will tell whether she tries to make any argument about the fact that she’s no longer in the Justice department. 

Jane Coaston: Ryan, thank you so much for joining me. 

Ryan Barber: Thank you so much for having me. This was great. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Ryan Barber, Wall Street Journal reporter covering the Justice Department. We’ll link to his work in the show notes. Pam Bondi will not be forgotten. And it also seems like she will not be missed, but I will miss you while we take a short break for ads. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. We’ll be back soon. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Jane Coaston: Crooked’s Washington correspondent, Matt Berg, is here to talk about the big stories. Happy Friday, Matt! 

Matt Berg: Happy Friday! 

Jane Coaston: So three things in life are certain these days, Matt. Death, taxes, and the Department of Homeland Security being in shutdown limbo I don’t understand. But Trump is sort of trying to solve this big problem, the DHS shutdown, not death. 

Matt Berg: Yeah. On Thursday, Trump posted another one of his Truth Socials saying that he’s going to sign an order to pay all DHS employees, which is similar to what he did last week, which was just focusing on TSA agents. But there are some big questions remaining about how this would even work. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, like, where is the money coming from? Like, what is he paying them with? 

Matt Berg: That’s the big unknown thing here, is that Trump’s TSA order last week was funded by the big beautiful law, but it’s not clear if there’s enough money left um to fund the other parts of DHS, which include you know Coast Guard and cyber security workers um and FEMA. 

Jane Coaston: Also, Congress is still out, and I believe that they are supposed to play some role in this. But once again, it’s another example of Trump trying to solve a problem he created with money he may not actually have access to. But speaking of attempting to solve problems Trump created, uh across the pond, the United Kingdom is trying to help by hosting talks Thursday with more than 40 countries on how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Guess who didn’t attend? The US. Which is why the Strait of Hormuz is closed. 

Matt Berg: Yeah, I think everyone could have seen this coming. The meeting came days after Trump just told these countries to, you know, go and get their own oil if they care so much. 

Jane Coaston: Which is a real, go get your own ball that I’ve kicked into somebody else’s yard vibe. But again, also, that’s way easier said than done. Again, because of the United States. 

Matt Berg: Yeah, there are a lot of big risks here. This we’re talking about is, you know, going through the Strait of Hormuz where Iran’s forces have been launching missiles and might’ve even laid mines there. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, in theory, these countries could make a deal with Iran to open the strait, but there’s no way Iran’s going to come to the table as long as the U.S. keeps attacking, because why would they? Like, what would even be the point? 

Matt Berg: Especially after Trump’s speech on Wednesday night, uh where he had a lot of strong words for Iran. Let’s take a listen to the clip here. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong. 

Matt Berg: It sure doesn’t seem like the Strait is going to be open any time soon, but, I mean, who knows, maybe Europe could get something together. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, it also is telling that Trump wants to wind down the war by bombing Iran into the Stone Age, and then he thinks that Iran should open the Strait of Hormuz, like why would any country do this? Like that’s not how any country has ever worked, except in the imagination of Donald Trump. 

Matt Berg: Yeah, there’s a lot that we could dig into in that speech. And I don’t know if I want to, or if we have the time, but on a different note, Jane, I love a good poll. And I know that you love a good poll. And there’s new one out that caught my eye about people who are way too online. 

Jane Coaston: You mean like, me and you?

Matt Berg: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you’re projecting, you know, I’m I’m never online. 

Jane Coaston: It could be, I could be. Who could say? 

Matt Berg: Anyways, the poll that I’m talking about was conducted last summer by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and Gallup. It found that Americans who spend more than five hours on social media per day are less supportive of democracy. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, that explains a lot if you just check Twitter over the last three years or so. The poll also found that people who spend that much time on social media are also more likely to feel like their opinions are valued, which is worrying. 

Matt Berg: Yeah, that is what stuck out to me the most too. I mean, so you’re saying that people who are spending way too much time on social media feel less democratic and at the same time they think that their opinions are being valued. That does not sound like a winning combo, especially right now. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, Matt, I think we should go outside and touch some grass. Thank you for joining me as always, but um let’s get out of here. 

Matt Berg: Yeah, let’s, thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: And that’s the news. [music break] 

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, enjoy a fun comparison from California Republican Representative Darrell Issa, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how Issa joined Fox Business on Thursday to explain how Trump’s Wednesday address reminded him of another two-term Republican president. 

[clip of Darrell Issa] You heard from the first president since Richard Nixon who said about ending wars and did not want to have protracted wars but would use large amounts of of force to bring them to a close. And by the way, we launched a mission to the moon, the first one since Richard Nixon in 1972. So I do believe that President Trump is showing the kind of leadership that we’ve been without for a long time. 

Jane Coaston: Like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and I wonder how all that ended up for Richard Nixon. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, and Ethan Oberman. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]