President Donald Trump ousted embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after she publicly threw him under the bus, and now he may have his sights on another member of his Cabinet.
According to The New York Times, "President Trump has discussed firing Attorney General Pam Bondi in recent days as he grows frustrated with her leadership at the Justice Department and her handling of the Epstein files, according to four people familiar with the conversations."
Trump's working idea is reportedly to replace Bondi with Lee Zeldin, the former New York congressman currently serving as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
For now, the administration denies any such idea is in the works, per the report: "Mr. Trump has not made a final decision, and Ms. Bondi’s allies pointed to photos of her and the president traveling to the Supreme Court on Wednesday to dispute the notion that the president is planning to fire her. 'Attorney General Pam Bondi is a wonderful person and she is doing a good job,' Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times. A spokesman for Ms. Bondi referred to Mr. Trump’s statement."
Nonetheless, this comes after months of reporting that Bondi, a longtime Trump loyalist who helped bury a probe into the president's former fake university, has fallen short of what Trump wanted out of her.
As early as last July, Trump was said to lay the blame for the Jeffrey Epstein case files controversy on her mishandling, and according to a report in January, he has been privately raging to aides that Bondi can't get his legal priorities enacted.
"The House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Ms. Bondi last month to compel her to testify about the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who died by suicide in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019," said the report. "Her deposition is scheduled for April 14, though she and Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the committee’s Republican chairman, have been working together to avoid the deposition, even though it is unclear whether it is legally possible to withdraw a subpoena."
