WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has privately discussed the possibility of firing Attorney General Pam Bondi and replacing her with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, three people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Thursday.
In those conversations, Trump has discussed his ongoing frustration with Bondi over her handing of the Jeffrey Epstein files and hurdles the Justice Department has encountered in investigations into Trump’s perceived enemies, the people said. The Republican president has mentioned other candidates but has raised Zeldin’s name as recently as this week, the people said.
The people were not authorized to publicly discuss the private conversations and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.
No decision has been announced, and Trump has been known to change his mind on personnel decisions.
“Attorney General Pam Bondi is a wonderful person and she is doing a good job,” Trump said in a statement produced by the White House.
Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from New York, has been publicly and privately praised by Trump, who at an event in February described him as “our secret weapon.”
Bondi, a former state attorney general in Florida and a Trump loyalist who was part of his legal team during his first impeachment case, has been in her position for more than a year. She came into office pledging that she would not play politics with the Justice Department, but she quickly started investigations of Trump foes, sparking an outcry that the law enforcement agency was being wielded as a tool of revenge to advance the president’s political and personal agenda.
She has also endured months of scrutiny over the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files that made her the target of angry conservatives even with her close relationship with Trump.
Under Bondi’s leadership, the department opened investigations into a string of Trump foes, including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.
The high-profile prosecutions of Comey and James were quickly thrown out by a judge who ruled that the prosecutor who brought the cases was illegally appointed. Other politically charged investigations have either been rejected by grand juries or failed to result in criminal charges.
