The Journal. - Gaetz, Bondi and Trump's Department of Justice

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

After recognizing his nomination was facing an uphill battle, former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration for U.S. Attorney General. WSJ's Sadie Gurman describes how president-elect Donald Trump's first pick unraveled and why he chose former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi for the role instead. Further Reading: -Trump Picks Pam Bondi for Attorney General After Gaetz Withdraws  -Matt Gaetz Withdraws From Consideration as Trump's Attorney General  -Matt Gaetz Had Sex With 17-Year-Old, Witness Told House Ethics Committee  Further Listening: -The Scramble Is on to Fill Trump’s Cabinet -What a Republican Congress Could Mean for Trump  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The past few days have been pretty wild for our colleague Sadie Gurman. She covers the Justice Department and has for the last seven years. In the annals of my experience covering the Justice Department, even this one was a bit of a crazy week. We started the week investigating sexual misconduct allegations against Trump's first attorney general, Matt Gaetz. And every day there was just this drip, drip, drip of bad news about Matt Gaetz. For years, the lawyer and former Florida congressman has faced allegations of sexual misconduct

and drug use, allegations that he's denied. But with Gaetz poised to head a powerful federal department, concerns about those allegations grew. And yesterday… You know, maybe around noon, I just hear people start shouting, Gates is out, Gates is out. And so, you know, then that sort of started this long rolling day. Gates' withdrawal was a hit to President-elect Donald Trump, who sees the job of attorney general as one of the most important roles in his new administration.

The DOJ Department of, I call it the Department of Injustice. I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical out of control prosecutor in America for their illegal racist and reverse enforcement of the law. Because they're using the Department of Justice to rig the campaign. The attorney general pick has been Trump's number one personal priority and he has long considered this remaking the Justice Department one of his central issues in his agenda. Now, Trump has a new pick to lead the department, former Florida Attorney General, Pam Bondi. Bondi is somebody who's been by Trump's side

from the very beginning. She's had a close personal relationship with Trump for years, and she served on his legal team during his first impeachment. So I think that Trump sees that as somebody who might be a good attorney general. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, November 22nd. Coming up on the show, in Trump's bid to reshape the Justice Department, Matt Gaetz is out, Pam Bondi is in. How do airplanes fly? What's in this box? What does this thing do? Kids are curious about everything, including guns. Learn how to store your guns securely and make your home safer at nfamilyfire.org. Brought to you by N Family Fire, Brady and the Ad Council. So, Donald Trump as president-elect, you know, he's been making a bunch of cabinet and department head picks. Where does the job of attorney general rank generally?

It's one of the most important jobs. It's sort of a unique cabinet role in that this attorney general is supposed to work toward advancing the president's political agenda, just as other cabinet secretaries, but they're also supposed to be independent and shield their investigations from political interference. So this person kind of plays a dual role and it's been important in any administration, but it's been especially important to Trump because of his long, strained relationship with the Justice Department. That strained relationship goes back to Trump's first term, when he was frustrated that the department didn't always go along with his agenda.

Take his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Well, Sessions, very early on in his tenure, recused himself from an investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russian interference in the 2016 election. And Trump just viewed that as the original sin and their relationship was never the same after that because that took him out of direct oversight of the investigation. And then for his second attorney general, he chose William Barr, who was viewed early on as an establishment conservative, but really did go to bat for Trump and was

a defender of his, in particular a skeptic of the investigations into him. But as his time in office drew to a close, he refused to go along with Trump's allegations of widespread voter fraud and refused to say publicly that the Justice Department had found any such fraud. And so that put him ultimately at odds with the president. And those are the types of incidents that Trump doesn't want to see a repeat of. Trump does not want to see a repeat of this. He has like openly railed against these two and just bashed them ever since then.

So he's been looking for somebody who will be a little more malleable. And so he initially picked former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. Why him? What did he see in Matt Gaetz? Well, Matt Gaetz was certainly among the most sharpest critics of the Justice Department on the Hill. He sat on the House Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of the Justice Department, and he used that perch to, you perch to rail against the FBI, to accuse Attorney General Merrick Garland and other officials of targeting Trump for political purposes and unfairly targeting conservatives.

And he was sort of this face of the anti-DOJ. That was one reason Gates was controversial among his colleagues on the Hill. So when he was nominated? It was shocking. It was shocking across party lines. On the Hill, Republicans very early on expressed doubts that he would be able to be confirmed, like Senator Lisa Murkowski. You know, like she said, Gates was not on her bingo card. But we even saw some early skepticism from people like Senator John Cornyn, who has sided with Trump a number of times. So that was the striking thing. And inside the Justice Department, people were just kind of freaking out about this prospect. People who were even open-minded to the possibility of some of Trump's other picks were very, very concerned about the possibility that Gates would become attorney general. And even some legal conservatives that I talked to who had been looking for jobs in the Justice Department

were rethinking their decision and trying to stay away from that. That's so interesting. So they were just like, I don't know about this. I'm going to wait and see how this all comes out. Yeah, I mean, the messages, the text messages that I was getting as soon as that was announced were like, well, I don't want to work for this guy. One thing loomed over Gates's nomination. He had been under investigation. In 2020, the Justice Department had looked into whether Gates had engaged in sex trafficking a minor. Gates denied wrongdoing, and the Justice Department ultimately chose not to pursue charges. But

the accusations prompted the House Ethics Committee to launch its own investigation. The committee conducted its investigation behind closed doors. When Trump announced Gates as his pick for attorney general, many members of Congress wanted the committee's report to be made public. But Gates resigned from his seat to pursue the attorney general nomination. And since he was no longer a member of Congress, House Republicans said that the report would not be released,

though there's still a possibility it could be. Still, details from the report became public this week, including some of the accusations made in testimony. According to a lawyer for a witness, his client told the panel she saw Gates having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a party in 2017. And she, along with another woman, testified that Gates had paid them for sex. Gates has long denied ever having sex with a minor as an adult, or paying for sex. And

he said, quote, every investigation into me ends the same way, my exoneration. Some senators had continued to call for the report to be released and met with Gates to talk. But then yesterday, he withdrew from consideration. He posted that his candidacy for AG had become a necessary distraction and he didn't want to put Trump through that. And so when he withdrew, what did Trump say? What did that mean for Trump?

Well that gave Trump another chance to go back to the drawing board. He had already assembled a list of people that he had been looking at and he chose very, very quickly, within hours, he chose Pam Bondi. After the break, what we know about Pam Bondi. So who is Pam Bondi? What do we know about her? Well, Bondi, much like Gates, is steeped in Florida Republican politics. She served two terms as Attorney General of Florida, and she later took up lobbying for a firm that had close ties to Trump called Ballard Partners.

She also recently worked behind the scenes at a Trump-aligned legal group called America First Policy Institute. She represented him during his 2019 impeachment, which centered on whether he sought political favors from Ukraine. And during this time, she was a very vocal defender of him. She took to the Senate floor as part of his legal team and delivered this sort of scathing speech about Hunter Biden's relationship with a Ukrainian energy company. Hunter Biden's decision to join Burisma raised flags almost immediately.

One article from May 2014 stated, the appointment of Joe Biden's son to the board of Ukrainian gas firm Burisma has raised eyebrows the world over. She's also been very vocal on television in support of Trump. There's no legal justification for anything they're saying because President Trump did nothing wrong. That's why they all have to get together. It's absolutely absurd what's happening. And that's the kind of thing Trump wants to see

in his attorney general. How does she compare to Gates as a nominee for attorney general? She certainly has a more traditional resume than Gates. Having worked as a line prosecutor, she will have something in common with the people that she leads if she's confirmed. But yet she's similar to Gates in that she's also this fierce ally and this loyalist who is made clear that she's willing to do what Trump wants at DOJ, just like Gates.

So how have Republican senators responded to this new pick? The reaction from Senate Republicans has been much more optimistic and much more favorable. One Republican referred to her as the next attorney general and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called her a grand slam, touchdown, hole-in-one, ace, hat-trick, slam dunk, Olympic gold medal pick. So that's a far cry from what we saw the first time. Is there a sense that Bondi might have an easier path to confirmation than Matt Gaetz? Yes, I think that's definitely true.

That's not to say that she doesn't have anything that would be questionable in her background. One thing that might be scrutinized is the extent of Bondi's ties to Trump. In 2013, Trump gave a $25,000 donation to a PAC that was supporting Bondi's re-election campaign for Florida Attorney General. That kind of donation isn't usually that notable, but the timing of it might raise eyebrows. Just days before that donation was made, Bondi was reviewing allegations in a fraud lawsuit about Trump University.

She was trying to decide if she would join this suit. Ultimately, she decided not to, and she's denied any connection between the donation and the decision. Is it likely that this will come up during the Senate confirmation hearings? I think this is going to be one of the first things that comes up during her confirmation hearings. It was certainly the first thing that everybody was talking about yesterday. So I expect we might learn a little bit more about that. What do we know about what the Justice Department would look like under Pam Bondi? Well, historically, the Attorney General has been somebody who, you know, sort of keeps

this arm's length relationship from the White House, supports the president, but keeps details of investigations, secrets, and, you know, doesn't cave to any sort of political pressure to do the White House's bidding. But I think that if Pam Bondi were in charge of the Justice Department, we would see that relationship grow a little bit closer. I think we would have somebody who, you know, is in frequent communication with Trump and might be more comfortable acting on some of his requests. She's a loyalist. She's shown a willingness to do the kinds of things he wants. That's all the kinds of things that Trump

has been looking for in an attorney general and things that he didn't necessarily get out of his first two attorneys general in his first term. That's all for today, Friday, November 22nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by C. Ryan Barber. The shows made by Catherine Brewer, Jonathan Davis, Piya Gadkari, Rachel Humphreys, Ryan Knutson, Matt Kuang, Kate Linebaugh, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alessandra Rizzo, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierre Singy, Jeevika Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zemis, and me, Jessica Mendoza, with

help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, So Wiley, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening.

See you on Monday.