Well, we have arrived at the conclusion of Donald Trump’s first 100 days of dictatorship, and the zone is still flooded. Writing a column these days feels like one endless round of political whack-a-mole.
High tariffs! Inflation! Firing thousands of federal workers! Peddling Trump bitcoin from within the White House! Arresting judges! Sending brown men to South American concentration camps! Providing top-secret military information to your relatives via unsecured, prohibited applications! Stealing personal data of American citizens from the IRS and the Social Security Administration! Lying nonstop! Shaking down law firms because they exposed the ridiculousness of your voter fraud allegations after the 2020 election! Removing federal funding for research at Harvard University! Dismantling the Department of Education! Attacking social safety-net programs! Following children home from school in order to arrest and deport their parents!
One hardly knows where to look first.
But just for today, let’s talk about a Department of Justice (DOJ) that is complicit in defying court orders, courtesy of Attorney General (AG) Pam Bondi. Among all of the other brazen violations of ethics and human decency that are the hallmark of Trump 2.0, an attorney general who appears either unacquainted with or indifferent to the Constitution of the United States seems like a pretty big deal to me.
It appears that the time is right to pluck Ms. Bondi from the MAGA mosh pit to have a closer look.
According to Wikipedia, Bondi was the Florida AG from 2011 to 2019. Although her friend Donald Trump subsequently praised her for successfully reducing drug overdose rates in Florida, the reality was that by the time she left office, drug overdose rates had doubled in the Sunshine State. Neither math nor truth have ever been part of Trump’s limited skill set.
[As a side-bar, Bondi declared last week, during a televised cabinet meeting, that Donald Trump had single handedly saved 75 percent of Americans from overdosing on Fentanyl. Just to be clear, 75 percent of Americans do not buy street drugs. Ever. Approximately 15 percent of Americans buy street drugs. Plainly, math and truth are just as challenging for Pam Bondi as they are for Donald Trump.]
Ms. Bondi continued her successful career by preventing two state attorneys working within the Florida Economic Crime Division from investigating a robo-signing scandal at Black Knight financial services company. Black Knight thanked her promptly by making a $1.2 million donation to her campaign.
Skinflint Donald Trump was equally eager to provide a quid pro quo campaign contribution in 2013—although it was hardly in the same league as the payday provided by Black Knight—after Bondi announced that she intended to join the multi-state lawsuit against Trump University for having fleeced a whole bunch of people out of a whole bunch of money under false pretenses. Four days later, she reversed herself after Trump gave her a check for $25,000. Trump was later found liable for fraud and was required to repay the Trump University students he bamboozled. Ms. Bondi, instead of advocating for the residents of her state, turned her back on them for the price of an economy car.
For Pam Bondi, justice is always for sale. If the price is right, she is more than willing to make just about anything go away.
As a woman who clearly has her priorities in order, Pam Bondi once changed an execution date for a prisoner on Florida’s death row so that the execution would not coincide with, and derail, one of her fundraising events.
Among Ms. Bondi’s other signature endeavors while serving as Florida’s AG was her attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act’s mandate prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher premiums to individuals with pre-existing conditions. There are a lot of folks in Florida with pre-existing conditions, as there are nationwide. She clearly did not give a damn about what might happen to them if they could not access healthcare. One wonders how much money the insurance lobby gave her in exchange for those efforts.
Term-limited Bondi stepped down from her position in 2019 and built a bridge to the future by becoming a paid lobbyist for the governments of Qatar and Kuwait, along with GEO Group, a private prison company based in Boca Raton.
Let’s just stick a pin in that and come back to it later.
Ms. Bondi had a large stable of clients in her career as a lobbyist, presumably because of her close ties to the commander-in-cheat. The lobbying gig, along with paid MAGA speaking appearances, made her a wealthy woman. Her current net worth hovers around $10 million. While this does not begin to approach Donald Trump’s level of wealth, it is certainly wealthy enough. Given her previous rapacity as a state AG, I conclude that she would be very happy to be richer still at public expense.
During that same period, Ms. Bondi also joined Donald Trump’s first impeachment defense team following the Russia-gate scandal. It would not be unreasonable to surmise that her eagerness to defend the indefensible was the act that cemented her “favored Barbie Doll” status with Trump.
No one will ever accuse Ms. Bondi of being “for the people.” Ms. Bondi is for one person exclusively: herself. She is more than happy to serve as Donald Trump’s lackey because it affords her the opportunity to further enrich herself at Trump’s Big Bacchanal, his signature all-you-can-steal buffet in Washington, D.C. It is an uber-exclusive piggery, since it is located inside the White House.
Thus, Florida’s sorry excuse for a former state attorney general has now become a sorry—and scary—excuse for the attorney general of the United States. Given that the Supremes have done us the favor of making the DOJ subservient to the whims of the malignant narcissist who managed to get himself reelected, it is hard to imagine a more willing or amoral accomplice than Pam Bondi.
Since assuming the mantle of attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi has demonstrated her fidelity to the rule of law by getting rid of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (Putin, Trump, and Bin Salman are very grateful); shutting down the DOJ’s KleptoCapture task force (Putin, Trump, and Bin Salman are very grateful); reducing enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (sense a theme developing here?); forcing the resignations of lawyers who refuse to behave unethically; going to war with diversity initiatives; and bringing back federal executions (although one presumes, based on Ms. Bondi’s history, that executions will be temporarily stayed on fundraising days).
What a dynamo.
But Bondi’s most grand accomplishment by far is her decision that the United States Constitution, and lawful court orders, are completely irrelevant. Thus, the president who does whatever the hell he wants all day every day—much of it illegal, immoral, and unethical—has picked a perfect partner in crime-spree and made her his attorney general.
Now, let us return to GEO Group, the prison-for-profit company that Pam Bondi represented during her time as a lobbyist. As a matter of practice, lobbyists are most successful when they have a large Rolodex of powerful government contacts. And as corruptible contacts go, there are few who trump Trump. His tendency toward larceny, lawlessness, and abuse of power, along with his pathetic need for incessant flattery, make him an easy mark.
Because of Bondi’s relationship as a well-paid lobbyist for GEO Group, and her slavish devotion to Trump, GEO Group received massive government contracts to run profitable prisons, to the natural detriment of the incarcerated. Evidently, prison just wasn’t quite horrible enough for the imprisoned.
Profiting from human misery, just to be clear, is despicable. And because making prisoners even more miserable than they already are is seemingly not quite lucrative enough, GEO Group also runs for-profit mental hospitals because the mentally ill, apparently, also have not suffered enough. I worked for a for-profit mental health facility once, and all I can say is that it is not only a license to steal; it creates a culture of abuse.
This next bit, from Wikipedia, is long-ish but important to the discussion:
On August 18, 2016, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the Justice Department intended to end its Bureau of Prisons contracts with for-profit prison operators, generally. As of 2015, GEO Group operated 26 federal prison centers, for the departments of both Justice and Homeland Security, which would have been affected by this change in policy. These centers had a total capacity of 35,692 prisoners, representing 45% of the company’s revenue.
On February 23, 2017, newly confirmed Trump administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the August 2016 guidance. In March 2017, Pablo Paez, GEO Group vice president, defended the legality of his company’s $225,000 donation to a pro-Trump political action committee. He said that the donation was made by a subsidiary, GEO Corrections Holdings, Inc., which has no contracts with any governmental agency, rather than directly from GEO Group itself. Democratic Congressmen Emanuel Cleaver and Luis Gutiérrez disputed that claim in a letter to GEO and its rival, CoreCivic. The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint challenging the contribution with the Federal Elections Commission. GEO and CoreCivic each donated $250,000 supporting Trump’s inaugural festivities, according to the corporations’ spokesmen. GEO gave $275,000 to the pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now, according to FEC filings. A $100,000 donation had been made only a day after Sally Yates, at the Department of Justice, announced it would be phasing out its for-profit prison and detention contracts.
In April 2018, a wholly owned subsidiary of GEO Group called GEO Acquisitions II gave $125,000 to a political action committee in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which bars companies with active contracts with the federal government from making political donations.
On January 26, 2021, United States President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14006 directing the United States Department of Justice to cease the renewal of federal contracts with private prisons. As a result, in 2021 Geo Group reported that they had closed six of their facilities as a result of the contracts not being renewed by the federal government and that their last facility under direct contract with the Bureau of Prisons would phase out in September 2022. They reported that this resulted in a decline of $240 million in revenue for the 2021 fiscal year.
In February 2025, Geo Group announced they would reopen Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey as an immigration detention facility with capacity to detain up to 1,000 people.
There is absolutely nothing surprising about the above information, since it is simply a foregone conclusion that anyone seeking a relationship with our government either through Pam Bondi or Donald Trump is expected to spread lots and lots of cash around. GEO Group paid to play, and got right back into the game. For Bondi and Trump, it is all graft, all the time.
Bondi and Trump have now commissioned GEO Group to build detention centers for deportees. Because they are in the “profiting-from-human-misery” business, they can be relied upon to provide an extra dose of cruelty, and as most of us understand at this juncture, the cruelty is the point.
Some of the undocumented have already been sent to the aforementioned South American concentration camps without the benefit of due process. The ACLU brought several cases, as have several state attorneys general and scores of immigration attorneys. The courts, including the Supremes, have told the administration to stop. Yet ICE agents wearing black masks are still disappearing people off the streets of America. So, cruelty is not the only point; sheer terror is riding shotgun.
As a result of those cases, the Trump administration has been ordered to return at least two of the disappeared, who have no—repeat, no—record of criminality: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a husband and father who has never been a gang member (the Department of Homeland Security managed to Photoshop a gang tattoo onto his untattooed knuckles because hey, that’s how they roll); and Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay cosmetician.
Apart from being undocumented immigrants, they have committed no crimes. Donald Trump could certainly bring them back to be tried and either convicted or exonerated of gang involvement, but he refuses. Wing-woman Bondi appears to be indifferent to the grotesque miscarriage of justice and indifferent to lawful court orders as well.
Arresting people and deporting them in the absence of due process is unconstitutional. Pam Bondi doesn’t care. Disappearing people off the streets by agents dressed as Black Ops goons is unconstitutional. Pam Bondi doesn’t care. Arresting Muslim college students, who possess legitimate student visas, for simply criticizing the destruction of tens of thousands of innocents in Gaza violates the First Amendment of the Constitution. Pam Bondi doesn’t care. Deporting children who are United States citizens is also unconstitutional. Pam Bondi doesn’t care about that, either.
Here is the thing about democracy: It is entirely over when the DOJ is more interested in violating the law than in enforcing it.
Ergo, democracy is now over.
So, I caution you here and now: if there is a 2026 midterm election, it will be a sham. Should the Republicans in Congress be voted out of office (and if it is a clean election, that is a foregone conclusion), the Democrats will achieve a clear and decisive majority, and they will do what Republican legislators have not: prevent Donald Trump from abusing power. For this reason, if an election is even allowed to take place, election officials hand-picked for their corruptibility will either work overtime to disenfranchise voters or report false results; or, if the election is free and fair, Pam Bondi will declare election fraud so that Donald Trump can declare martial law. America will then become a militarized autocracy.
It will be the final brick cemented into the wall of the dictatorship.
The American Bar Association should disbar Pam Bondi, immediately, for the egregious violations of professional ethics that she has committed, repeatedly, for close to 20 years.
What on Earth are they waiting for?
