From this writer’s lips to God’s ears. Pam Bondi is skating on ice that only one attorney general has ever so daringly gone out on and that man was John N. Mitchell, attorney general to Richard Nixon. Nixon and Trump share many qualities but not the idea that the loudest and ugliest voice in the room is the one that automatically wins the argument. Nixon was too smart for that, too good of a lawyer. That idea belongs to non-lawyer and game show host Donald Trump and Pamela Jo Bondi has taken the lesson to heart.
She, like John Mitchell, is going way beyond the parameters of her job. She believes she has an aura of immunity about her and that she is the law. She’s about to come in for a rude awakening, at least according to Rick Wilson. Bondi is about to find out that she and Mitchell share more than a job title.
And Congress, even a dysfunctional one, possesses tools sharper than press releases. Contempt citations are not symbolic gestures. Funding battles are not academic exercises. The resurrection of investigatory authorities has a way of becoming bipartisan when scandal ripens. The GOP majority is on the endangered species list, and accountability is coming in hot for Pamela Jo Bondi.
Mitchell once assumed he was the system. That proximity to the President placed him at the center of gravity. What he discovered, too late, was that institutions bend until they don’t. And when they snap back, they do so with force.
There is a dark comedy in watching modern officials treat Watergate as sepia-toned lore rather than a lived warning. The lesson was not subtle: the Attorney General is not the President’s fixer. The Department of Justice is not a panic room for the politically vile. And obstruction is not a victimless crime.
Mitchell didn’t go to prison for breaking into the Watergate complex. He went for conspiracy. For perjury. For obstruction. For believing that process crimes were technicalities rather than felonies. The same kind of crimes Pam, Todd, and Kash are committing today.
He went because he mistook loyalty for legality.
The question hovering over the present moment is not whether the Epstein files are embarrassing. They are. It is not whether powerful people would prefer selective disclosure. They would.
The question is no longer whether the Attorney General of the United States believes that shielding her Master is a defensible exercise of executive authority. She quite evidently does.
But this is a perilous flirtation with history’s judgment in service to a man with no loyalty or honor to his subordinates.
Records are being made.
Emails are being sent.
Instructions are being given.
And someday, someone will read them aloud in an indictment.
History does not always repeat itself, but it does maintain impeccable bookkeeping.
The first Attorney General to go to prison did so because he convinced himself that the ends justified the means and that the law was pliable in his hands. Pam Bondi should take that to heart, if she has a heart.
In Washington’s midnight hour, the lights burn long. The statements are polished. The documents are redacted, shredded, lost, and uncataloged. The lies are sold as legal prerogatives, falsely, but with volume and venom.
But somewhere in the background, the old echo remains, the sound of a prison door closing on a man who thought he was too powerful to ever hear it.
It is a sound worth remembering.
Bondi is now relying on offpoint, emotional manipulation in lieu of reasoning. There’s a phrase in Latin for it, which describes a classic fallacy of logic, “ad misericordiam.” It means “a diversionary tactic aimed at manipulating feelings to win an argument, rather than providing logical proof.” We see this constantly in Trump world and we saw it in abundance on Wednesday when apropos of nothing, Bondi started talking about the Dow and the Nasdaq, and attacking Jamie Raskin, “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser of a lawyer. Not even a lawyer.” (The Congressman from Maryland is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former professor of constitutional law.) So who knows what Bondi was even attempting to do, other than give the MAGA folks at home something to be shocked/proud about, that a non lawyer dared to question the sitting attorney general and she clobbered him?
It was a childish tantrum which furthered no cause on Bondi’s part and even earned her the derision of various MAGA influencers like Tim Pool, Erick Erickson and Kyle Rittenhouse. Bondi has indeed decided that the loudest and ugliest voice in the room wins the game — but this isn’t a TV game show. It isn’t Fox News. Eventually the law will catch up to Bondi. And then look out. For now she makes John Mitchell look like a loyal but misguided Eagle Scout. And Donald Trump will not save her from his or her own excesses. You remember the old expression, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
