MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace and legal experts on her show Wednesday flagged Donald Trump's attorney general pick, Pam Bondi, for saying one thing to Fox News and another under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Wallace played video clips of Bondi telling Fox News that she and Trump would not leave Pennsylvania in 2020 until they changed the state's vote to Trump.
Judiciary ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked Bondi about the election, and Bondi refused to answer if Joe Biden won in 2020. On Fox, however, she eagerly continued claiming that Biden was an illegitimate president and claimed she'd heard of "fake ballots" and "ballot dumps."
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She rebuffed questions about whether she would investigate or indict former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and denied that Donald Trump would ever ask her to drop a case against one of his allies. Wallace recalled that it had already happened under former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump begged to "let Flynn go."
Former top DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said the one benefit to Bondi was that Pete Hegseth's hearing was the previous day, in which struggled to answer basic questions about international affairs. At the same time, the Senate is aware that the first choice was former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
"So, you know, compared to that, she's doing great," said Weissmann about expectations for Bondi.
He called out two red flags in Wallace's opener for the segment.
"One is her answer about who won the presidency [in 2020] and whether there was outcome-determinative fraud. She threw in there not just that Donald Trump had a massive current win, which overplays what happened, which is concerning. But also said there was a peaceful transfer of power," said Weissmann.
It tries to rewrite what happened on Jan. 6, lawmakers have said. Bondi also complained about leftist protesters chanting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices. It also flies in the face of the work of the Justice Department on over 1,000 prosecutions.
"The second is in response to Sen. [Adam] Schiff (D-CA) when she throws in, what we should be talking about is the crime rate in your state," continued Weissmann. "That is such a political answer. If this was a political debate, if you were advising politicians, maybe that's an okay answer, right? A good defense is a good offense. That's not the right response for somebody who's supposed to be the role of the attorney general of the United States."
He pointed out that the attorney general must be "dispassionate and apolitical." That changed under Trump's previous administration, and her answers indicate that it will return.
"Whatever she's trying to portray, she still has all of the realness of the Fox News clips that you were playing," he closed.
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