Bondi Has The Proven Experience To Be Attorney General

Pam Bondi, President-elect Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney General, is the most experienced career criminal prosecutor ever slated to be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. She has more criminal trials under her belt as a prosecutor than any modern U.S. Attorney General, and possibly more than every previous one.

In our nation’s history, there have been 86 U.S. Attorneys General. Those 84 men and two women each had distinguished careers as state governors, members of Congress, U.S. Attorneys, a Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy, a law school dean, state and federal judges, state attorneys general and a district attorney. Some of them acted as criminal prosecutors at the state or federal level for periods of time.

Much of the commentary about Bondi has centered around her media hits and campaign appearances in support of President Trump, or her role on the team that defended the president during his impeachment hearings. Some critics or skeptics of Bondi suggest that those roles prove that she is somehow too loyal to Trump and thus won’t be able to fulfill her responsibilities as Attorney General. One has to wonder if those same critics would have taken issue with the fact that President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother to be the Attorney General.

But to us, the top prosecutor of the United States should have prosecution experience. Lots of it.

None of the 86 prior U.S. Attorneys General spent 18 years as a local criminal prosecutor handling every type of case from domestic violence to homicide and capital cases. Pam Bondi has.

Several former Attorneys General tried criminal cases as prosecutors. For example, Edwin Meese, the 75th U.S. Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, was a Deputy District Attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office for eight years, and handled hundreds of cases, including a capital case. Janet Reno, the 78th Attorney General under President Bill Clinton, was a line prosecutor in the Miami-Dade County State’s Attorney’s Office, but didn’t try any cases. Later, after she was elected as the State’s Attorney for that office, she tried a smattering of high-profile cases, but was not known as “trial dog,” a person who has mastered and tried myriad criminal cases.

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The Justice Department is a massive federal agency. It’s composed of 40 separate organizations, employs more than 115,000 people, and oversees all federal prosecutions. The 94 U.S. Attorneys, spread across the country, handle the bulk of federal prosecutions. Leading that organization is a massive undertaking for anyone.

Bondi served as Attorney General for Florida from 2011-2019. The Florida Attorney General’s Office is one of the largest in the country, employs almost 1,300 people, and is spread across 14 offices throughout the Sunshine State. That office, like the U.S. Justice Department, handles a wide variety of criminal and civil matters.

If extensive criminal trial experience as a prosecutor and leading a large state attorney general’s office matters — and it certainly does for us — then Pam Bondi stands out in the crowd and is uniquely qualified to be the next Attorney General of the United States.

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Cully Stimson is the Deputy Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal & Judicial Studies, where he and Zack Smith serve as Senior Legal Fellows. Both are former federal prosecutors, and Stimson also served as a local, state, and military prosecutor.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Wire.