Why 'Trump stooge' Pam Bondi best AG contender despite 'worse record than Gaetz': Elie Mystal
Earlier this week, former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi said during an MSNBC interview that Donald Trump's attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, is an even more "disturbing" choice than ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz, who bowed out of the running for AG last week amid sex trafficking allegations.
The new MAGA AG pick promised over the weekend that the Department of Justice will prosecute the prosecutors who indicted Trump.
However, in a column published by The Nation on Tuesday, justice correspondent Elie Mystal argues that despite Bondi having a "provably worse record than Gaetz on issues within the Department of Justice’s remit," he'd take the former Florida attorney general over "many" other contenders.
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"That’s because of the one thing she’s not: a Leonard Leo disciple," Mystal emphasized. "I’ll take a Trump stooge over a Leo stooge any day."
Leo, who helps lead the right-wing Federalist Society, is "a key architect of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court that rolled back the federal right to an abortion," according to NPR.
Mystal writes:
Lawyers devoted to Trump are like bank robbers. They waltz in, guns blazing, and take all the cash they can carry in their bags and pockets. They’re loud and brash and might shoot anyone who gets in their way, but they are fundamentally small-minded. They don’t really think past the next score.
Lawyers devoted to Leo are like bankers: They set up a system where they always win. They change the rules, and then force everybody else to play by them. They think creatively. Their goal is not a quick, smash-and-grab score but to build their own wealth over the long term. Once their ideas become entrenched, it’s incredibly difficult to undo what they’ve done.
The ex-Florida AG "is not a long-term Leo-like thinker; she’s a petty Trump supporter—and the other Leo-aligned people know it," the justice correspondent adds.
"But Trump didn’t go with any of the guys who earned their stripes from Leo," Mystal continues. "He didn’t go with any of the Heritage Foundation legal stars, or the ones working with Stephen Miller at his 'America First' group of legal terrorizers. Instead, he went with Bondi, who got her JD from Stetson University, clerked for nobody, and prior to assuming public office was mainly known (maybe just to me) as the lady who prosecuted former Mets star pitcher Dwight Gooden for violating his probation."
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Mystal's full column is available at this link.
