Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Elie Honig tells the Intelligencer that President Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney has destroyed public trust in an office that takes years to build it.
“Think of [the Department of Justice] as a reservoir and the water in it as public trust. It takes years to build up that water supply, but even a slight crack can drain it quickly,” writes Honig, who also served as the director of the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice. “After just five months leading the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi is threatening to leave the reservoir tapped out.”
The CNN analyst said Bondi had already walked in with a smudged reputation when she falsely proclaimed Trump “won Pennsylvania” in 2020, despite Trump’s loss by more than 80,000 votes. Honig adds she’d hurled accusations of “cheating” and “fake ballots” with no evidence, and even “strategized” with Trump advisers “to use those false claims to challenge the 2020 election results in the courts.”
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She never admitted to lying about any of that in her 2025 confirmation hearing, said Honig. Instead she retreated to the non-denial: "President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in.”
But since then, Honig says Bondi has revealed herself to be “an inveterate truth-stretcher” when she proclaimed Trump had single-handedly saved 258 million lives through fentanyl seizures, which is 75 percent of the U.S. population of 340 million people. She also outed herself as “a hopeless partisan” when she refused to open an investigation into the misuse of the Signal messaging app by top intelligence officials.
“To explain her inaction, Bondi preposterously concluded … that specific information about impending military attack plans was somehow ‘not classified and inadvertently released,’” Honig said.
But MAGA didn’t care about any of this until she also failed to deliver on big claims regarding the client list of notorious child molester Jeffrey Epstain, says Honig.
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In February, Bondi repurposed previously released Epstein-related materials as “breaking news”. And when MAGA got mad at her, she quickly promised a second document dump.
“It’s sitting on my desk right now to review,” Bondi claimed.
“But this week, Bondi’s own Justice Department acknowledged it was all flimflam,” says Honig. “… [N]o incriminating client list, no blackmail, no jailhouse murder, no basis to investigate or charge anybody else.”
“MAGA culture,” he said, “isn’t taking it well.”
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“Bondi was never going to win over liberals or Trump haters. But she somehow managed to sling so many false promises that she’s earned the ire of many of Trump’s most loyal supporters,” says Honig. “Now she’s left that reservoir of credibility — DOJ’s and her own — bone dry.”