Pam Bondi’s Recent History Is Troubling for the DOJ

President-elect Donald Trump’s current nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, has a long career in the public record. Here, the Brennan Center highlights two troubling aspects of Bondi’s recent history that merit further examination as part of her bid to lead the Justice Department.

Voting and Election Restrictions

Bondi oversaw a number of troubling voting rights and election lawsuits as the litigation chair for the America First Policy Institute.

Since its founding in 2021, Bondi has served as chair of the Center for Litigation at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a pro-Trump think tank and litigation group. Although the exact day-to-day responsibilities of Bondi’s role with AFPI are unclear, she is the first listed team member on the AFPI litigation team’s webpage and is also the listed author of multiple AFPI legal briefs, press releases, letters to government officials, and other public-facing work representing the organization.

With Bondi as litigation chair, AFPI has brought a series of concerning lawsuits in recent years, particularly in the voting rights and elections arena. In 2024, AFPI brought at least five lawsuits aiming to hinder ballot box access or disenfranchise specific groups of voters, according to the Brennan Center’s research.footnote1_BkPrXd27fycIwHXUvbWkoNN7bvsNyIItbdvrP4xhDmM_cUP1208yHkuz1These cases are Adams v. Fulton County Board of Elections and Registration, No. 24-cv-011584 (Ga. Fulton Cnty. Super. Ct. 2024)(originally case number 24-cv-006566 before being refiled due to failure to meet a pleading standard); America First Policy Institute v. Biden, No. 2:24-cv-00152-Z (N.D. Tex. 2024); American Encore v. Fontes, No. 2:24-cv-01673 (D. Ariz. 2024); Keefer v. Biden, No. 1:24-cv-00147 (M.D. Pa. 2024); and United States v. Town of Thornapple, No. 3:24-cv-00664 (W.D. Wis. 2024). Several of these lawsuits contain questionable factual and legal reasoning. Two significant examples are Adams v. Fulton County Board of Elections and Registration and America First Policy Institute v. Biden. Although Bondi did not appear as the attorney of record for these cases, there is evidence indicating that these suits were likely brought with her knowing consent, and her exact level of involvement in each is worth further probing.

In Adams, AFPI brought a lawsuit in Georgia on behalf of a local election board official who sought certain authorities that could have enabled her to unilaterally delay or deny the certification of elections. When AFPI launched this suit, Bondi coauthored an organizational press release where she was quoted as saying “the goal of this case is simple: we are asking the Court to tell the Board to follow the law.” However, her statement — and AFPI’s ask in this suit — conflicted with a century’s worth of Georgia case law, which clearly states that local election board officials are legally required to certify results. As the Brennan Center and other election experts pointed out, AFPI’s arguments in this case were meritless and radical.

A Republican-appointed judge in Georgia dismissed AFPI’s case out of hand in October, holding that the organization’s request was prohibited by the state’s constitution and election code. The judge noted that AFPI’s requested ruling would have “silenced” and disenfranchised all of the hundreds of thousands of voters in Georgia’s most populous county. This outcome would have been wildly undemocratic, with racially disparate results, as 60 percent of Fulton County residents are people of color.

AFPI v. Biden is another recent example of the type of concerning voting rights litigation launched by AFPI during Bondi’s tenure. In Biden, AFPI challenged Executive Order 14019, which President Joe Biden issued in March 2021 to encourage federal agencies to, amongst other directives ordered in accordance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, integrate voter registration opportunities into their services — similar to the role played by departments of motor vehicles around the country. As part of its lawsuit, just weeks before the 2024 election, AFPI filed a petition for emergency relief that asked the court to immediately block the executive order. This last-minute emergency petition ignored the fact the order had already been in place for over three years, including during the 2022 election, and argued it was a “weaponize[d]” and “partisan” scheme to register noncitizens to vote to benefit Democratic candidates.

AFPI did not provide any basis to refute the well-established fact that noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is vanishingly rare and remained incredibly rare both before and after Biden’s nonpartisan executive order went into effect. The case was brought before Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the sole federal trial judge in Amarillo, Texas, and a conservative Trump appointee known for his nationwide injunction on the abortion pill and rulings on other contentious social issues. Kacsmaryk denied AFPI’s emergency request, holding that the organization did not have standing and that its petition provided “no direct evidence to support its claim” that the executive order was illegally registering noncitizens to vote for Democrats (as of September 2024, the Brennan Center is serving as counsel of record for intervenors in AFPI v. Biden). Nevertheless, AFPI’s lawsuit served to amplify baseless conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting. Had it succeeded in 2024, it would have undone voter registration services that thousands of Americans rely on, just before the 2024 election. AFPI’s lawsuit in Biden is currently stayed until early 2025, after the Trump administration takes office.

Bondi was not the attorney of record in Biden. However, three months before the lawsuit was launched, Bondi, in her capacity as AFPI’s litigation chair, sent a series of public letters to top election officials in nine different states asking them to do more to stop noncitizens from voting. In each of these letters, for which Bondi is listed as the sole author, she criticized E.O. 14019 on the grounds that it would have a “pronounced” impact on “illegal alien votes” — echoing the same meritless claims about the executive order that appeared in AFPI’s Biden lawsuit just a few months later.

The DOJ is responsible for enforcing voting rights laws. In turn, Bondi’s time as AFPI’s litigation chair, the organization’s record on voting and elections, and Bondi’s level of direct involvement in these cases all warrant further exploration.

Election Denial

Bondi played an early and active role in spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election.

While assisting Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, Bondi made several public-facing statements about the 2020 election results — especially in Pennsylvania — that deserve close attention.

On the day after Election Day in 2020, Bondi attended a Trump campaign press conference in Philadelphia alongside Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. At that press conference, Bondi twice asserted that Trump had “won Pennsylvania.” However, at that time, approximately 1 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania had yet to be counted and no major media outlets had called the state for Trump. The next day, Bondi appeared on Fox News and doubled down on her assertion that Trump had won Pennsylvania, claiming that there was mass “evidence of cheating” in the state, “fake ballots,” and people who had “receiv[ed] ballots who were dead” and still may have voted. During that interview, she also expressed confidence that the Trump campaign’s ongoing litigation in state and federal court might eventually vindicate her view that Trump had won Pennsylvania.

Ultimately, none of the several lawsuits that Giuliani and Trump’s team brought challenging the results in Pennsylvania revealed any evidence of widespread cheating or election fraud, and they were categorically dismissed by both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Furthermore, a week after the 2020 election, then–Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, made a televised statement criticizing the allegations of fraud in Pennsylvania as having no basis in fact. Around this same time, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania attorney general noted that courts had determined there was “no proof provided that any deceased person ha[d] voted in the 2020 election.” To date, Bondi has never recanted any of her false statements regarding the 2020 election.

Bondi was not the only attorney to make these false statements. Giuliani made them in public and also in court as the attorney of record in several of Trump’s frivolous Pennsylvania lawsuits. According to new public reporting by the Washington Post, Giuliani testified to a DC Bar committee that it was Bondi who had convinced him to go to Pennsylvania to assist Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Giuliani’s in-court statements about widespread election fraud and deceased voters in Pennsylvania, which the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court called “demonstrably false,” formed a basis for his disbarment in New York and Washington, DC. Bondi made similar false statements, but outside a court of law.