Trump fires Attorney General Pam Bondi, considers Lee Zeldin

President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday.

Bondi’s dismissal comes after reports that Trump was increasingly unhappy about her handling of Department of Justice files about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the DOJ’s failure to successfully prosecute several of the president’s political enemies.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as acting interim attorney general, said Trump, who in a social media post called his former criminal defense lawyer Blanche a “very talented and respected Legal Mind.”

Trump is reportedly considering Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, as a permanent replacement for Bondi.

“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900,” the president wrote.

“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future,” Trump said.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican whose bill mandating that the DOJ release all files related to Epstein became law in late 2025, said in an X post, “I support Trump firing Pam Bondi. Do you?”

“I hope the next AG will release all the Epstein files according to the law and follow up with investigations, prosecutions, and arrests,” Massie said.

Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, in a post earlier Thursday on X said, “If the reports that Lee Zeldin will be replacing Pam Bondi as Attorney General are true – I welcome it.”

“Bondi handled the Epstein Files in a terrible manner and made this situation far worse than it had to be for President Trump,” Mace wrote. “I look forward to a new Attorney General.”

Trump, in his second term, has been much more conservative in firing high-level officials than during his first term, which was marked by a series of abrupt terminations, including that of his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

Trump fired Sessions in May 2017 after the then-attorney general recused himself from overseeing a DOJ investigation of his 2016 presidential campaign’s contacts with Russians, which led to the DOJ’s appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to handle that probe.

Bondi is widely seen as having bungled the release of files related to Epstein, who years ago had been a friend of…