In This Episode
In our 28th episode of This F*cking Guy, Erin and Alyssa dive deep into the past of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. From stealing orphaned children’s dog, to becoming Trump’s lapdog, to her shady involvement with the Epstein files, to role-playing as Trump’s personal lawyer, this may be our most theatrical sycophant yet!
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TRANSCRIPT
[AD BREAK]
Erin Ryan: Welcome to another edition of This F*cking Guy, the show where we choose one f*cking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I’m Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria Podcast.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And I’m Alyssa Mastromonaco, the other host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast.
Erin Ryan: Today’s f*cking guy is remarkable because in an administration comprised entirely of churlish, bratty supplicants who care more about being on TV than they do about not being dumb, she may be the most churlish, brat-y supplicant of all, Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Bondi has more experience sucking up to Donald Trump than just about any other politician in America. She’s been sucking up Trump for almost as long as some of you have been alive. She was the first prominent Florida Republican to endorse Trump in 2015 and has attached to his butt ever since.
Erin Ryan: But dirty Pam was a sycophant before she latched onto Trump like a radioactive swamp lamprey. Before she was a dirty AG, she was dirty state AG, and before that, she was a dirty dog mom.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Can’t wait to learn about how one can be a dirty dog mom.
Erin Ryan: Pam Bondi was born on November 17, 1965, in Tampa, Florida, hey, a Scorpio, and grew up in a suburb called Temple Terrace.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Crazy that Tampa can produce something as fun as Magic Mike and as lame as Pam Bondi.
Erin Ryan: Pam’s parents were both teachers. Her dad was a professor of education at the University of South Florida, and even was the town’s mayor when Pam was growing up. Her mother, Patsy, was a beloved elementary school teacher. Completely normal, like Jeffrey Dahmer’s parents. Pam has two younger siblings. One of them seems pretty normal and non-public, so we’re not even going to talk about her. The other one, Brad, is a lawyer like his big sis and is also practicing law in D.C.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: We’ll talk about him more later, but for now, here’s what other lawyers think about Bondi and Bondi. The brother and sister legal wonder team. When Brad Bondi ran for the president of the DC bar this year, a record number of lawyers voted in the election, and Brad Bondi’s opponent won with 90% of the vote.
Erin Ryan: Rigged. Bondi graduated from college and law school and began to work as a prosecutor shortly thereafter, a job she held for 18 years. Apparently she was just totally normal back then. People who knew her at the time have said that she didn’t seem to have strong political leanings but did enjoy lawyering.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In 1990, when she was 24, Pam Bondi married a man named Garrett Barnes. They divorced just 22 months later. This is why it’s a terrible idea to get married before your frontal lobe is done developing.
Erin Ryan: In 1996, Pam got married again, this time to a Tampa teacher named Scott Fitzgerald. That also didn’t last. They divorced in 2002. After that, for a period of time, she was more focused on dogs and being on TV than she was on love. Shortly after Bondi’s beloved St. Bernard passed away from cancer in 2005, she adopted a St. Bernard puppy that had been left homeless by the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. She named him Noah.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Maybe I like her more now.
Erin Ryan: No, no, no. You have to listen to the rest of the story. So Pam adopted this dog from a shelter in Florida, but in January 2006, the dog’s family found him and wanted him back. Yeah, he already had a family, a grandma and a grandpa and their two grandkids. Alyssa, do you wanna know why those kids were living with their grandparents?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yes.
Erin Ryan: Because their parents had died. They were orphans. Orphans displaced by a hurricane. When they lost their home during the storm, they’d given their dog to a shelter temporarily, they thought. But somehow their puppy got transferred to a rescue and was adopted by Bondi from there. So after they found him, the disaster-ravaged family asked for him back. And Pam was like, no.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: She tried to keep the puppy away from the orphan children?
Erin Ryan: Yeah. She even implied to one publication that the dog, originally named Master Tank, had been severely neglected by the original owners. Master Tank’s real family had to sue Bondi to get their dog back. A lawyer offered to represent them pro bono in the case. And after 16 months of legal battles, wherein Bondi tried to use her knowledge of the legal system to exhaust the family into giving up, a court forced her to return Master Tank.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Erin, my first cat, Shrummie, was also a Katrina rescue and I hope he haunts her dreams.
Erin Ryan: Pam Bondi got a new dog shortly thereafter. This dog fight was covered everywhere from People magazine to local media, both in Louisiana and Florida. And the incident even landed in an anti-Bondi ad when she was running for attorney general in 2010. Now, when Bondi threw her hat in the ring for the Republican Party’s nomination for attorney-general of Florida, observers noted that she’d been a registered Democrat until 2000. Bondi defended herself by saying that she wanted to have a bigger impact in Democratic primaries That wasn’t exactly true because she hadn’t voted in several primaries between 1984 and 1992. People who knew her say that she went from a political centrist to a hardcore Republican seemingly overnight. Bondi did what she had to do, which is fake it until you make it. She defeated two other Republicans to win the party nomination and ended up winning the general by a comfortable margin, thanks in part to a high-profile endorsement from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who was still taken seriously by Republican Party politics at the time.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh, Sarah Palin walked so that Marjorie Taylor Greene could run and Greene ran so that Lauren Boebert could give a handjob at a Beetlejuice matinee.
Erin Ryan: That’s exactly why they did those things Alyssa. During Bondi’s run for AG, a business called Lender Processing Service donated $31,972 to the Republican Attorneys General Association, $26,500 to the Republican Party of Florida, and $500 directly to Bondi campaign. As soon as Bondi took office, she started acting like she was working for LPS, which is a problem because Lender Processing Service was victimizing the people of Florida.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Lender Processing Service is one of those banal-sounding companies with an evil mission. It helped banks steal homes through foreclosure fraud. Without getting too in the weeds, Florida was one of many ground zeros for the 2007 and 2008 real estate collapse. Banks would take mortgages, package, and resell them, but not keep track of who actually owned the underlying property, aka following the chain of title. Of course, since scams and slime are so endemic in Florida, there was a thriving foreclosure mill business in the state that aimed to swipe houses right out from underneath homeowners by mass-producing foreclosure paperwork, some of which was blatantly fraudulent. One of those was LPS.
Erin Ryan: So Bondi had pledged to fight foreclosure fraud and protect consumers during her campaign, but she actually did the opposite. [laughter] When she got elected, LPS was under investigation by the state of Florida, thanks in part to Teresa Edwards and June Clarkson, two attorneys in the Economic Crimes Division of the Attorney General’s office. According to David Dayen, author of a 2016 book on foreclosures fraud called Chain of Title, here’s what happened next. Quote, “Clarkson and Edwards were deliberately frozen out of the 50 state attorney general investigation of foreclosure fraud. Despite having the most knowledge of any prosecutors in the country. Most of their cases against the foreclosure mills were taken away from them without even being able to provide transition notes to the new prosecutors. They were ordered not to speak to any other AG office, share any documents, file discovery requests, or take depositions. They were essentially neutered from performing their job at the height of a massive crime wave they helped uncover.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And then Pam Bondi fired them.
Erin Ryan: Well, technically, she gave them 90 minutes to decide if they wanted to quit or be fired.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Wow, what a return on investment. LPS paid like $57,000 and Bondi did everything they wanted. If I were a dirty company, I’d be buying up dirty politicians left and right.
Erin Ryan: Bondi’s office even lobbied the AG’s office in Michigan to get them to lay off prosecuting LPS while LPS was under investigation by the state of Florida. That’s crazy.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Crazy.
Erin Ryan: At the end of the day, all the people whose homes had been stolen out from under them got a $2 million settlement. That is not much money, house-wise.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Not much money. No.
Erin Ryan: There was also the matter of the Trump University bribe. Sorry, I mean, donation.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Donation.
Erin Ryan: In 2013, Bondi office announced that the state Florida was mulling joining a lawsuit against Donald Trump’s scammy eponymous university. Three days later, Trump donated $25,000 to Bondi’s re-election campaign. Bondi later admitted that her camp had asked Trump for the donation directly.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And suddenly, the state of Florida wasn’t joining the fraud lawsuit against Trump University anymore.
Erin Ryan: What an incredible coincidence.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Trump and Rudy Giuliani threw a fundraiser for her at Mar-a-Lago the next year.
Erin Ryan: Another incredible coincidence, Bondi also palled around with Scientologists as early as 2010, when she toured one of the church’s facilities. In 2014, six prominent Scientologists hosted a fundraiser for her in Clearwater, Florida. And in 2016, she spoke to a group called Florida Citizens for Social Reform. It was a group originally founded as a political action committee for the Church of Scientology, but since transition to being a social welfare group.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The speech was given at an event at the Fort Harrison Hotel, which is the flagship hotel for the Church of Scientology’s Clearwater, Florida headquarters.
Erin Ryan: We must insist here that this was not a Scientologist event. It was not. It simply was an event thrown by a group that was originally a political action arm of the Church of Scientology held in a hotel that is also the flagship of the church of Scientologist headquarters regarding issues like human trafficking and labor abuse, issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the Church Of Scientology.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: We cannot emphasize enough for legal reasons how little human trafficking and labor abuse have to do with the Church of Scientology.
Erin Ryan: Bondi claimed through a spokesperson that she was hanging out with Scientologists because she had a personal interest in combating human trafficking, which is true. When she ran for AG, it was something she campaigned on. And she did take on a few human trafficking cases when she was Florida’s top lawyer.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Except she left one very prominent Florida human trafficking case alone, Jeffrey Epstein.
Erin Ryan: There it is. [horn sound effect] Jeffrey Epstein. I feel like he’s going to make an appearance in every single This F*cking Guy until the end of time. That’s right. Those of you who have seen our Ghislaine Maxwell This F*cking Guy episode know this, but to refresh your memory, Bondi took office a few years after Epstein was given a sweetheart deal by the feds. By the time Bondi was in office, Epstein had already been released from jail, but Epstein’s victims had never been informed of the deal, which they claimed violated the law because it did violate the law. Bondi was pressed to take action on behalf of the victims in the Epstein case, but for some reason, she did nothing. Huh, weird.
Erin Ryan: During her 2010 Attorney General campaign, one of her opponents attacked her from the right, accusing her of not being hardcore enough in her opposition to gay rights.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But once Bondi was elected, she fought as hard to keep gay people from getting married in Florida as she did to keep those hurricane Katrina ravaged orphans from getting their puppy back. The bigot vote needn’t have worried.
Erin Ryan: She worked tirelessly to uphold Amendment 2, a 2008 Florida constitutional amendment that defined marriage as between one man and one woman. Same-sex couples who had been married in other states but lived in Florida sued to have their marriages recognized, but Bondi and her team argued that such a move would do irreparable harm to the state. Why? Well, according to Bondi’s court filings, because same-sex couple can’t have biological kids.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Mmm. She argued that the state has an interest in promoting heterosexual marriage but not gay marriage because there is a, quote, “clear and essential connection between marriage and responsible procreation and child rearing.” Hmm.
Erin Ryan: Hmm. Okay, and while Pam was busily defending the sanctity of child-producing straight marriages in a hypocritical irony that was not lost on Florida’s alternative and gossip press, Bondi was busy at work on marriage number three.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s 2012. Our double divorcee has found love again in Dr. Greg Henderson, a multimillionaire eye doctor. The two were living together. They were engaged. In May, she and Henderson flew 70 guests, including then governor Rick Scott, to Grand Cayman Island. Bondi even put on an apron and handed out cocktails to her guests on the flight.
Erin Ryan: But according to a Florida gossip blogger named Jose Lambiet the ceremony was canceled at the last minute with no explanation. Guests got there and it was like, never mind. Wedding’s postponed. Bondi tried to smooth out the bad publicity by claiming to another gossip columnist—
Alyssa Mastromonaco: How many gossip columnists are there in Florida?
Erin Ryan: I don’t know, but considering how long Matt Gaetz was able to wag his dong at various prom committee meetings, not enough. Anyway, according to another Florida gossip columnist, Bondi claimed that she was never going to get married on the lawn at the Ritz-Carlton, where other people get married all the time. She was actually just having a pre-wedding party in a white dress, and the real wedding was going to happen at a Baptist church, TBD, except the real marriage never happened either. She and Henderson broke up at some point before she was sworn in for her second term as Florida’s Attorney General in 2015. They never even applied for a marriage license. Not only did Bondi try to prevent same-sex couples’ marriages from being recognized in Florida, in one prominent case, she tried to prevent a same-sex couple from getting divorced. I know. [laughter]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: What?
Erin Ryan: In court filings in 2014, Bondi claimed that Heather Brassner was not allowed to divorce Megan Lade because the couple’s civil union was not the same thing legally as a marriage
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Divorce for me, but not for thee. Now if Pam Bondi were just a regular broad, we’d be apathetic to celebratory about her Elizabeth Taylor-style life choices. Get married seven times, girl, do you. But she’s sucks.
Erin Ryan: She does suck. The Huffington Post called her a modern-day Anita Bryant after the 1970s Florida beauty queen and crazy person who traveled, like literally crazy, who traveled the country throwing rallies wherein she accused gay people of being child molesters.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And just for context, Bondi was defending homophobic laws all the way up to 2015, the year the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal nationwide. She was filing endless appeals and positioning herself as one of the most visible opponents of gay marriage, even after 20 states had bans similar to Florida struck down by the courts. Overall, Bondi’s unsuccessful gambit cost the taxpayers of Florida half a million dollars in legal bills. And all they got was embarrassment on the national stage.
Erin Ryan: On June 12, 2016, a man armed with a semi-automatic weapon and a handgun opened fire on patrons of the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando before being shot dead by police. 49 people were killed and 58 others were wounded in one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. And in the aftermath, Pam Bondi tried to make herself out like a kind and compassionate supporter of gay people.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Which led to Bondi flop sweating her way through this very awkward interview with Anderson Cooper, who rightfully wanted to know how she could suddenly claim to love the gays when she’d spent so much of her time using the power of her office to oppress them.
[clip of Anderson Cooper]: I talked to a lot of gay and lesbian people here yesterday who are not fans of yours and who said that they thought you were being a hypocrite, that you for years have fought, you’ve basically gone after gay people, said that in court that gay people simply by fighting for marriage equality were trying to do harm to the people of Florida, to induce public harm, I believe was the term you used, in court. Do you really think you’re a champion of the gay community?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: Let me tell you, when I was sworn in as attorney general, I put my hand on a Bible and was sworn to uphold the constitution of the state of Florida. That’s not a law. That was voted into our state constitution by the voters of Florida, that’s what I was defending. It had nothing to do, I’ve never said I don’t like gay people, that was ridiculous—
[clip of Anderson Cooper]: But you do say, but do you worry about using language, accusing gay people of trying to do harm to the people of Florida, when doesn’t that send a message to some people who might have bad ideas in mind?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: Anderson, I don’t believe gay people could do harm to the state of Florida.
[clip of Anderson Cooper]: But you argued that in court.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: My lawyer argued a case defending what the Supreme Court allowed the voters to put in our state constitution.
[clip of Anderson Cooper]: But you are arguing the gay marriage, if there was gay marriage if there were same-sex marriage that would do harm to the people of Florida’s Florida society.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: That it was constitutional to put that in this, in the—
[clip of Anderson Cooper]: Are you saying you did not believe it would do harm to Florida?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: Of course not, of course not.
[clip of Anderson Cooper]: Had there been no same sex marriage, you do realize that spouses, there would be no spouses, that boyfriends and girlfriends of the dead would not be able to get information and would not able to probably even visit in the hospital here. Isn’t there a sick irony in that?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: Well, I was defending the constitution of what’s over 69% of the voters within the constitution—
[clip of Anderson Cooper]: But the Federal Court said that’s not the Constitution, and you continued to fight it.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: That’s why we rushed it to get it to the u.s. Supreme Court because we—
[clip of Anderson Cooper]: Well, before it was the Supreme Court, there was a federal judge, and you continued to fight it after the federal judge ruled, and in fact you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money fighting it.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: We rushed to get it to the Supreme Court. You know what today’s about? Human beings.
Erin Ryan: Have you ever been with a terrible man who is like, I didn’t call you a bitch, I said you were acting like a bitch? Like, that’s the sort of semantic she’s arguing.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In 2013, Bondi was forced to apologize after delaying the scheduled execution for convicted rapist and murderer Marshal Lee Gore.
Erin Ryan: Now, Alyssa, you know I’m normally, I’m like anti-capital punishment.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Of course.
Erin Ryan: But I read about this guy and I was like, hmm, maybe. This is a strong case for this one. Gore had been sentenced to death for a string of horrific crimes, including leaving one victim for dead on the side of the road and driving off in her car with her two-year-old son sitting in the back. The kid ended up okay, just thank god not to get too in the weeds here. But his execution had been delayed three times by the state of Florida over questions of his sanity. But the fourth time wasn’t a sanity issue. It was a Pam Bondi scheduling issue. You see, she had to attend a re-election kickoff reception, AKA a fundraiser for herself.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Bondi later apologized, saying it wouldn’t happen again. Gore was executed on October 1st, 2013.
Erin Ryan: In 2016, a group of religious leaders and nonprofits sued Pam Bondi, claiming a state law violated their free speech rights because it forced them to explain the effects of and alternatives to abortion to abortion patients. In July 2018, the law was ruled unconstitutional and Bondi and others were ordered to stop enforcing it, and the plaintiffs were paid a settlement.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Bondi also joined amicus briefs on a case challenging access to contraception through the Affordable Care Act, a case that banned abortion after 15 weeks gestation, and other anti-abortion legislation in other states. She also urged then-Governor Charley Crist to sign a law that would have required Florida women to look at an ultrasound image before having an abortion, as though the fact that there’s a fetus in there would be a surprise to them.
Erin Ryan: The human uterus is one of those toys and you open and you’re like, which What Labubu did I get? A fetus! It’s a fetus again. [laughter]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: They’re always fetuses. Pam Bondi became the first major Florida politician to endorse Donald Trump for president in 2016, although she was for Jeb Bush before she was for Donald Trump. Please clap.
Erin Ryan: I’ve heard from people in the know that she wasn’t very involved in the actual work of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. However, she secured a plum speaking spot at the 2016 Republican National Convention nonetheless. This could be because Trump appreciates rewarding loyalty, or it could be that he likes blondes.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I guess we’ll never know.
Erin Ryan: Bondi turned out of her office in 2019 and immediately became a lobbyist at Ballard Partners. Her job was basically to work on behalf of well-moneyed clients who wanted to be connected with people in the Trump orbit.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Clients like the government of Qatar, Amazon, and a private prison corporation called GEO Group.
Erin Ryan: Nightmare, blunt rotation. [laughter] She wasn’t tapped to be a member of the first Trump administration, but she did land a position on the team defending Trump from his first impeachment, which is kind of like being voted most improved in a beauty contest. Pam kept laying it on thick, though, latching onto the big lie after the 2020 election. She even made an appearance at the now-infamous press conference that Trump’s legal team gave in front of a small Philadelphia landscaping business called Four Seasons Total Landscaping, which was selected because whoever set it up thought it was the Four Seasons Hotel. And by the time everybody showed up, it was too late.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: MAGA is so allergic to reading that they couldn’t even be bothered to read past the first two words of a Google result.
Erin Ryan: Anyway, that little snafu brought us this incredible moment when Bondi’s ranting is drowned out by the sound of a nearby protester blasting Beyonce’s party. [music plays]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Wait, Erin, is that Corey Lewandowski next to her?
Erin Ryan: Yes, that’s Kristi Noem’s boyfriend Corey Lewandowski.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I was curious, you think Kristi was a little jelly?
Erin Ryan: I don’t know how Kristi [overlapping speak] knows emotions work because her face can’t convey them, so I’m not sure. But yeah, that’s quite a dream team.
[AD BREAK]
Erin Ryan: Pam Bondi had finally slurped up enough shit to satisfy Donald Trump. After he was elected for the second time in 2024, she was in line to be Trump’s attorney general.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Now she wasn’t Trump’s first pick. That honor would go to Matt Gaetz, whose penchant for cavorting with underage girls was so distasteful that not even the MAGA cult in the U.S. Senate could bring themselves to vote for him. By the way, have we seen the results of that congressional investigation into his conduct?
Erin Ryan: No, no we haven’t. Somebody please just leak it, my gosh. What is the point of people knowing how to hack if they’re not going to release embarrassing investigations into the sexual conduct of pervy congressmen? Once Gaetz’ nomination was clearly not going anywhere, Trump called on his loyal lapdog, Bondi. But don’t worry, there were no hard feelings between the two Floridians. Bondi and Gaetz had long been bros. Ruth Marcus’s New Yorker profile of Bondi claims that she was basically the godmother to Matt Gaetz’ dog, whatever that means. And after all this stuff about him came out and Trump announced that Bondi and not Gaetz would be his pick for AG, rather than distance herself from him, Bondi apparently called Gaetz up to offer him a job in the justice department.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He said no, for now. Pam Bondi’s address moved from inside Trump’s rectum to so far up President Trump’s ass that she’s helping him chew his breakfast once she was confirmed as AG in February. On February 10th of this year, she stormed into the National Security Division of the Justice Department and started ripping the portraits of previous administration officials off the walls herself. Then she turned her ire to Devin DeBacker, the acting head of the division, and said, in what I can only imagine, in her atrocious Tampa accent.
Erin Ryan: God. I hate having to do this accent.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: You gotta do it.
Erin Ryan: Don’t you people realize who won the election?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Your impression of her is starting to make me picture her as a faded Southern belle on the cusp of mental unraveling, like a Tennessee Williams character.
Erin Ryan: A street car named Pam. [laughter]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But that psycho move wasn’t enough. After that, she fired the guy who had been in charge over pictures. And then of course she bragged about it on Fox News because if Pam Bondi does something and doesn’t brag about it on Fox news, did it even happen?
Erin Ryan: Pam Bondi’s career was kind of made by appearing on television and speaking in short, easy-to-understand sentences. Now, we care about you, and we don’t want to subject you to one of Pam Bondi’s excruciating Fox News appearances. So just to give you a sense of what they’re normally like, we did a little editing and cut one together to make it easier to watch. What’s happening?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: I am deranged, I think I am above the law and I am not. I am harboring a fugitive. I am helping hide one. I am giving a TDA member guns. I am illegally in this country. We will come after me and we will prosecute me, we will find me.
Erin Ryan: [laughter] Pam, really? Like, girl. She loves to make threats. It should come as a surprise to nobody that Dirty Pam is a shitty boss. She’s transformed the Department of Justice in much the same way a bull would transform a china shop. Tons of career justice department officials have left, and not just the ones that the neon blondes at Fox News would characterize as defenders of the woke left.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yeah, as of August, more than half of the attorneys working for the division in the DOJ that expressly defends executive orders in court have left, which is probably why the Trump administration keeps face-planting in court when states actually challenge some of their AI-assisted dictatorship he’s trying.
Erin Ryan: When Pam was sworn in as AG, the fourth Mr. Pam Bondi was next to her, a Florida investor named John Wakefield. It’s not clear whether the two are married or not. The New Yorker says they’re married. Donald Trump called Wakefield Bondi’s handsome husband. But neither of them have confirmed it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I read something that said they had some kind of fruity ass commitment ceremony that wasn’t technically a wedding.
Erin Ryan: Completely unrelated, she has a painting of Robert F. Kennedy hanging in her office due to her closeness with RFK Jr., who also is famously great at marriage. [laughter] Do with that what you will. During Pam’s stint as AG, we’ve gotten some toady Hall of Fame moments, like this one from a cabinet meeting in March when she claimed that Donald Trump had single-handedly saved the lives of more than two-thirds of the population of America.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Since you have been in office, President Trump, your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 3400 kilos of fentanyol, which saved, are you ready for this media, 258 million lives.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: [laughter] Move over Doris Kearns Goodwin, new presidential historian Pam Bondi has entered the chat.
Erin Ryan: Bondi’s turbo-bootlicking almost wasn’t enough to save her from her own ineptitude. On February 21, she appeared on Fox News and teased some forthcoming juicy disclosures from the federal government’s files on dead sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
[news clip]: The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. Will that really happen?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump. I’m reviewing that. I’m review JFK files, MLK files. That’s all in the process of being reviewed because that was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies.
[news clip]: So have you seen anything that you said, oh my gosh?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: Not yet.
[news clip]: We’ll check back with you.
Erin Ryan: Not yet not yet I, I, get the impression have you seen anything not yet i don’t think she’d seen, I don’t think she’s seen anything at all. Because she burned it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yeah. And on February 27th, apparently without giving the White House a heads up, Bondi and Kash Patel, the bug-eyed podcaster that Trump put in charge of the FBI, made a show of distributing white binders labeled Epstein files, phase one, to 15 conservative influencers.
Erin Ryan: The influencers were a veritable pantheon of mental wellness, including that tragically homely libs of TikTok freak and a 40-year-old man with a receding hairline who calls himself DC Draino. After waving their folders around for photo ops like idiots on a Ferris wheel, some of the influencers actually opened them up and discovered that what was in them was all public information that had been previously disclosed.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I can’t believe that the Trump administration would use suckers for a photo op. By this point, Bondi was either lying about what was inside the Epstein files, or she was lying about having access to them in the first place. But she kept up the charade. Here she is on Sean Hannity’s show, seeming totally not like she’s making shit up as she goes along at all.
[clip of Sean Hannity]: I want to be clear because I think people got frustrated because they were expecting more. You were expecting more and you didn’t find out less than 24 hours before the release you got a whistleblower that confirmed that there were way more documents that they were supposed to turn over and then you found out just before that.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: Well, sure, and you’re looking at these documents going, these aren’t all the Epstein files. You know, they were flight logs, they were names and victims’ names, and we’re going, where’s the rest of the stuff? And that’s what the FBI had turned over to us. And so a source said, whoa, all this evidence is sitting in the Southern District of New York. So based on that, I gave them the deadline, Friday at eight, a truckload of evidence arrived. It’s now in the possession of the FBI. Kash is going to get me and himself, really, a detailed report as to why all these documents and evidence had been withheld. And you know, we’re going to go through it, go through as fast as we can, but go through it very cautiously to protect all the victims of Epstein, because there are a lot of victims. It’s a new day. It’s the new administration. And everything’s going to come out to the public. The public has a right to know. Americans have a right.
Erin Ryan: When I’m lied to. The thing that I hate the most is not actually the lie. It’s the person telling the lie thinks I’m dumb.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Totally.
Erin Ryan: You know it’s like it’s like a it’s a power play. It’s like Pam, girl.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yeah. So now this mysterious truck of evidence is sitting on Pam’s truck-resistant desk. She and Kash Patel are going over the documents together?
Erin Ryan: I guess. Bondi has this remarkable ability to seem like she’s lying unless she’s screaming, which is probably why in recent months she’s pivoted to mostly screaming.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I agree. Screaming seems much more trustworthy.
Erin Ryan: On July 7th, the Justice Department released its now-infamous Please Stop Asking About the Epstein List memo, wherein it claimed that it was impossible to release any more evidence that there was no Epstein client list, Jeffrey Epstein definitely killed himself, and that he was not blackmailing rich and powerful men. This upset a lot of MAGA people, including Laura Loomer, all of whom had been led along like cartoon donkeys by the carrot-on-a-fishing-line promises of Trump and his ilk, which was that the Epstein files were going to expose the way that the powerful abused the powerless and Trump was going to bring them down by exposing them.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Did they think that a memo would put a stop to their quest for the truth? First of all, we know they can’t read.
Erin Ryan: Don’t worry, Alyssa. Pam Bondi had just the ticket to calm the storm. She once again delivered a great, totally feasible sounding clarification.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: In February, I did an interview on Fox, and it’s been getting a lot of attention because I said, I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed, meaning the file along with the JFK, MLK files as well. That’s what I meant by that. And the minute missing from the video, we release the video showing definitively. The video was not conclusive, but the evidence prior to it was showing he committed suicide. And what was on that, there was a minute that was off the counter. And what we learned from Bureau of Prisons was every year, every night, they redo that video. It was old, from like 1999. So every night the video is reset. And every night should have the same minute missing. So we’re looking for that video to release that as well, showing that a minute is missing every night. And that’s it on Epstein.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This didn’t fly with some on the right, like Laura Loomer, who exists within the right-wing ecosystem like the herpes virus. Between painful outbreaks, she lies dormant, ready to be summoned by stress or nutritional deficiencies. Loomer was not buying any of Bondi’s excuses for not releasing the Epstein list, even accusing the Attorney General of being a secret Scientologist or working for the government of Qatar to protect powerful officials that were named in files. She even claimed that her inaction on the files as AG of Florida was indicative of something rotten.
Erin Ryan: I’m on Team Laura Loomer here for the first and only time. I mean, you can kind of see the ingredients in the crazy sauce here, right? Bondi has palled around with Scientologists and she did lobby on behalf of Qatar, but it’s completely unfeasible that Bondi is the one keeping the public from seeing what’s in the Epstein files. You know, the only reason she does what she does in the job that she has is because she does what Trump tells her to do.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Unfortunately, Pam Bondi is not a great improviser, which is a necessary skill to be a good liar. Bondi insisted that the reason that the files would not be released was that they contained child sexual abuse materials, or in the outdated parlance that Bondi still uses, child pornography.
Erin Ryan: Bondi had no follow-up announcement that the evidence would be used to open a federal investigation into where this child sexual abuse material came from, like who was distributing it, who is in it, what became of the child victims. No, no follow up whatsoever. If she’d only attended a UCB class or two, maybe she’d be better at coming up with something that made sense.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh, by the way, around this time, it was reported that Bondi had informed President Trump back in May that his name appeared in the Epstein files. And the Wall Street Journal first reported the existence of a birthday message featuring a crudely drawn image of a naked female torso that Trump made for Jeffrey Epstein that referred to a wonderful secret between them.
Erin Ryan: Just normal things. Normal thing for a 50-year-old men to do for each other. So the heat was on. Mid-July, the heat is on, and Bondi’s Justice Department tried to change the story by announcing investigations into Trump’s enemies, like James Comey and John Brennan. Unfortunately, she also fired Maurene Comey, around that time James Comeys’ daughter, but James Comey’s daughter Maurene just so happened to be one of the federal prosecutors who had been on the team that prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And also in July, another Justice Department official named Todd Blanche conducted a suspiciously timed two-day interview with Maxwell wherein the convicted child sex trafficker insisted that she’d never seen President Trump do anything wrong back when he and Epstein were besties and that her partnership with Epstein ended well before either of his arrests.
Erin Ryan: The dumbest motherfuckers in the Trump orbit believe that this testimony exonerated the increasingly guilty acting president, and the Department of Justice transferred Maxwell to a cushy jail camp in Texas. Days later, Bloomberg News would reveal that 18,000 emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s inbox revealed that Maxwell had lied a lot during her chat with Blanche. She’s still in the nice jail, though.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The Epstein files have yet to be released.
Erin Ryan: Again, I call on hackers to do something more interesting than installing ransomware in hospital billing systems. Bondi’s dramatic performance of zealous servility is reminiscent of a poorly trained dog with an anxious attachment style.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Pam Bondi is Donald Trump’s emotional support lawyer.
Erin Ryan: Absolutely. We saw this on display when Bondi was compelled to appear before the Senate Judiciary and Oversight Committee in October, which is part of her job. But rather than answer the reasonable questions that Democratic senators asked her, she responded with all the charm of a drunken tourist who’s trying to argue her way back into the Panama City Senior Frog she just got kicked out of.
[news clip]: I’d like to know from you what conversations you’ve had with President Trump about the indictment of James Comey.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: Senator, I am not going to discuss any conversations I have or have not had with the President of the United States.
[news clip]: Did you see that? Is there a tape that has audio and video of the transfer of the 50,000?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: You would have to talk to Director Patel about that.
[news clip]: I’m talking to you.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: I don’t know the answer, Senator.
[news clip]: Yes, you do know the answer.
[clip of Pam Bondi]: Don’t call me a liar!
[news clip]: Were you consulted by the White House before they deployed National Guard troops to cities in the United States?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: I am not going to discuss any internal conversations with the White House.
[news clip]: What’s the secret? Why do you want to keep the secret to the American people don’t know the rationale behind the deployment of national guard troops in my state?
[clip of Pam Bondi]: I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump. I wish that you loved your state of California as much you hate president Trump.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: We later discovered that Bondi had come to the hearing prepared with a folder of pre-written burns because she’s not smart enough to remember her own comebacks.
Erin Ryan: In addition to breaking new ground in the world of comedy, Pam has been doing important work as Attorney General, too. She approved the $400 million plane that the Qatari government wanted to give as a gift to President Trump.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Hey, didn’t she used to lobby for the Qatar government?
Erin Ryan: Sure did, Laura Loomer. [laughter] Shortly after Trump took office, the Department of Justice was working on a pilot program that would restore gun rights to certain non-violent criminals. The first round of people approved for that program were nine old white people, including a retired New York Jets player, all of whom had petitioned to have their rights restored years after their convictions for things like insurance fraud. But somebody else was mysteriously added to that list. Last minute. Mel Gibson. Who was convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence in 2011.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh no, Erin, not Mel Gibson.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, now normally people with certain domestic violence convictions aren’t allowed to have guns for obvious reasons. But Donald Trump is nothing if not the head star fucker in charge and he’s fascinated by celebrities. He even made Mel Gibson and John Voight two unofficial ambassadors to Hollywood.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Let me guess, Mel asked for his guns back and Trump’s 80s brain can’t say no to the star of Lethal Weapon.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, Gibson’s team apparently appealed directly to Trump, who passed along to Bondi, who dutifully did what her master told her to do, and told one of her deputies, an attorney named Liz Oyer, to add to the list, quote, “A famous friend of the president who had lost his right to own a gun due to a domestic violence conviction.” Oyer later testified before Congress that she refused to do so and was fired shortly thereafter.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And didn’t you say that we were going to bring up her brother Brad Bondi again? Oh, right, of course. So, Brad Bondi is a defense attorney in D.C. Since his sister has been attorney general, the DOJ has been mysteriously dropping charges against clients he’s representing.
Erin Ryan: Whoa.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yeah, in March, Trump pardoned a Mormon grifter named Trevor Milton who had been sentenced to four years in prison over his fraudulent electric truck company called Nikola. Nikola raised eye-popping amounts of money from investors only come to find out the truck didn’t work. In order to demonstrate that it worked. Milton rolled it down a hill.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Stop. Stop! [laughter]
Erin Ryan: Okay, here’s another one that Brad Bondi was representing. Just before leaving office, the Biden Justice Department opened an investigation into a Republican lawyer named Carolina Amesty, which sounds like a fake name that I would give on the fly. Amesty faced charges that she had defrauded the COVID relief program and was looking at up to 20 years in prison. She whined that she was being targeted for her politics, but suddenly in August her lawyer, again the AG’s brother, learned that the DOJ was no longer going to seek charges against her.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: What a coinkydink!
Erin Ryan: Then, mysteriously, a few weeks later, Feds announced that they wouldn’t be seeking charges against a Missouri property developer who stood accused of lying about hiring women and minority-owned subcontractors so that he could snag a tax break.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Hmm.
Erin Ryan: Brad Bondi was his lawyer too. So they’ve got kind of a Lannister-like symbiosis going, except instead of fucking each other, they’re double-teaming the concept of justice.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: She also seems, how do I put this delicately, dumb. She believes that as attorney general, she’s the president’s lawyer and argued before the Senate that she cannot disclose the content of conversations she has with the president, implying that it was due to the attorney-client privilege. But she’s not the president’s lawyer. The president has the office of White House counsel, which serves as his lawyers. The AG is America’s lawyer.
Erin Ryan: There’s been some rumblings that Pam Bondi isn’t actually the one running the show at the Justice Department either, that she’s just a figurehead. And some of Trump’s more male, more Nosferatu-looking goons actually have been pulling the strings.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Still, when push comes to shove, Pam Bondi should remember that Richard Nixon did not go to jail. His attorney general did.
Erin Ryan: All right, Alyssa, do you want to hear my unifying theory of Pam Bondi?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I’m ready.
Erin Ryan: I think she’s totally faking it. She’s a dog lover. Nobody who actually loves dogs or cats, if you’re like an animal lover, you can’t work alongside a person who bragged about shooting the animal that you loved.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh so true.
Erin Ryan: Like you’re a dog-lover and you can work alongside a puppy shooter and be okay with them. And nobody who really loves dogs would be okay, with ICE going into people’s homes and shooting their Rottweiler. Like that happened in El Paso. Even Donald Trump seems to kind of hate dogs. He doesn’t have a dog. He’s not a dog person. Pam Bondi’s a dog-person. Another thing about Pam Bondi, well, it’s clear that her forehead has not moved since the George W. Bush administration. She’s got the Perino special.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: She does.
Erin Ryan: A thousand units. She has yet to Mar-a-Lago-ify her face, like her colleague, Kristi Noem, or nemesis, Laura Loomer, or lesser legal nut-bag, Judge Janine. Eventually, all MAGA women of means must show their loyalty by carving themselves into a ghoulish pumpkin. And they have to remove their eyelid hoods. So they look like their eyeballs are sinking into their faces, and they have to pull the skin tightly over their skulls so that they look they’re made of wax, like Laura Trump. Having peroxide-fried hair simply isn’t enough. The truly compliant MAGA woman takes a look at herself in the mirror, concludes that, in this case, God did make some mistakes and gets a plastic surgeon to perform the maximum amount of gender-affirming care allowed. And so, I don’t think the Tampa Community Theater understudy-level theatrics of Pam Bondi will be enough to demonstrate her loyalty forever. She’s either gonna need a facelift, or she’s gonna have to shoot a dog to prove she is who she says she is.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: That’s dark.
Erin Ryan: Well, there you have it. Attorney General and the Urban Meyer of divorce, Pam Bondi. Where does she fall on our matrix of Fuckin’ Guys?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Erin, she’s a tough one. I’m gonna say it’s a little bit hard to pin Pam down on the spectrum because she is scheming, but she is also a bit stupid. And she definitely is an opportunist. I don’t feel like she’s a true believer. I don’t think you can start out as a Democrat and end up MAGA and be a true-believer.
Erin Ryan: Mm hmm.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: So I’m gonna call her a stupid schemer and an opportunist.
Erin Ryan: Right. So here, my basis of like rating her was I was trying to compare her to other Fuckin’ Guys. Like a Leonard Leo is like the ultimate schemer. And I’m like, could Pam Bondi hang with Leonard Leo? And the answer is no. [laughter]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: No.
Erin Ryan: Like I don’t want to compliment Leonard Leo whatsoever. Like the, the Tweedledum of the fall of democracy, whatever. But I think that he has like a long plan. He, he plays, he’s, he is thinking, I think she’s a stupid opportunist, but it’s not that hard intellectually to just act, overact it’s not hard to just like really lay it on way too thick. Especially if the person you’re laying it on thick for only understands emotions if they’re expressed in the extreme. So—
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay. And that’s Pam Bondi.
Erin Ryan: And that’s Pam Bondi. That’s all the time we have for this episode of This F*cking Guy. This episode was researched and written by me with an assist from Alyssa Mastromonaco. Fact-checking by Claire Fogarty. The rest of our credits and links to our sources, including Ruth Marcus’s work at the New Yorker, can be found in our show notes.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: If you like what you’ve seen, please subscribe and share.
Erin Ryan: And if you have some suggestions for future subjects of This F*cking Guy, please leave them in the comments. Take care, be well, don’t try to steal a dog from disaster survivors.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And fuck that guy.
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