Nomination of Pamela Bondi
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, on another equally important matter, this week, the Senate will vote on the nomination of Pam Bondi to serve as Attorney General.
Given the Trump administration's ongoing purge of Justice Department officials, I urge my colleagues to look very carefully and closely at Ms. Bondi's nomination. President Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he values loyalty above all else when it comes to Attorneys General.
Don't take my word for it. Look at what happened in his first term. He fired his first Attorney General and forced out a second for insufficient loyalty; and he said as much. President Trump has said time and again he expects the Justice Department to seek ``retribution'' on his behalf. In Ms. Bondi, I am afraid, the President has finally found someone who passes his loyalty test.
Now, look, if you look at the resume of Pam Bondi, you will find that she served as attorney general for the State of Florida for two terms. She has experience as an attorney general of our third largest State. You are not only going to hear that over and over, but it appears that she is prepared to break with bipartisan tradition when it comes to a nonpartisan Department of Justice--one that upholds the rule of law and is free of undue political influence from the White House.
I am not convinced that she is dedicated to these ideals. She was the leader in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. To this day, she still clings to the basic loyalty oath that was required of those who were a part of that effort. She refuses to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the Presidential election in 2020--she can't get over it--and she echoed the President-elect's calls for prosecuting his political opponents, including a pledge she made publicly that the ``prosecutors will be prosecuted, and the investigators will be investigated.''
Sadly, Ms. Bondi's threat is already coming to fruition. Since President Trump's inauguration, his administration has purged dozens of senior career civil servants at the Department of Justice and the FBI, including longtime nonpartisan leaders of the government's counterterrorism and counterespionage efforts. These career civil servants are responsible for coordinating the Justice Department's fight against international terrorism and foreign spies. These removals substantially diminish America's ability to respond to national security threats. Quite simply, they are a danger to the public. The Trump administration's purge of these officials is a naked political move.
In firing a dozen career prosecutors, the Acting Attorney General issued a memo that said in that memo:
Given your significant role in prosecuting the President, I do not believe the leadership of the Department can trust you.
How blunt can you be?
Line attorneys and agents are similarly being bullied now simply because their assigned tasks were linked to the criminal investigation of the President or the January 6 riots--one of the largest prosecutions in the history of the United States when an insurrectionist mob came to the floor of this Senate, rifled through my desk--I saw this on tape--assumed the chair that is being held now by the President of the Senate, posed for pictures, made all sorts of signs, left notes behind, and tore up the Capitol Building. At the end of the day, 140 law enforcement officers were hurt, and 4 lost their lives. That was the reality of what happened on January 6.
Do we expect the Justice Department to do nothing about the hundreds of people who stormed this Capitol? We saw it on videotape. Nobody is making this up. What they did was to prosecute them for the crimes that they committed. Many of them were sentenced, and many of them pled guilty when they saw the videotapes that portrayed exactly what they did on that day. The Justice Department prosecuted them, and many of them ended up in jail--some of them with serious sentences for their serious misconduct.
Now comes the new President, Donald Trump, and on his first day in office, he absolves them from criminal guilt and tells them they are free to go.
A question has to be asked of the American people: If someone came bursting into your home or your church or your school and tore it up, beat up those who were trying to maintain order and did it all on videotape, should they be held responsible for it?
I certainly think so. That is certainly true when it comes to this building, which represents the symbol of America and our democracy. If you want to desecrate this building, you should pay the price.
The American people deserve an Attorney General who will acknowledge that reality, who will protect the fundamental rights of this country, demonstrate independence and integrity, and remain faithful to the Constitution, the country, and the rule of law.
Ms. Bondi, during the course of her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, was also asked about Kash Patel, the President's nominee to head up the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She made it clear that she supports him. I don't. I don't because he doesn't have the experience to hold the job. He certainly has nothing in his background to suggest that he can supervise 38,000 FBI agents and employees and 400 field offices around the world trying to keep America safe every single day. Yet she stood behind him.
I fear Ms. Bondi will only protect and remain faithful to one person throughout this whole experience, and that is the President who is giving her this opportunity.
I urge my colleagues to look carefully at her record and the record of Kash Patel. They are a team in this effort, and they should be held accountable for what they have said and written and the positions that they have taken in support of the President, even when his positions are not consistent, in my mind, with the equal and free administration of justice.
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