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US President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday after months of strained relations and named his former personal lawyer to serve as the acting chief of the Justice Department.
The move, which the Republican president announced in a social media post, comes amid criticism of Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files and her failure to successfully prosecute several perceived Trump political foes
“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump said on Truth Social. “Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country.”
Bondi “will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector,” the president said, and will be replaced on an interim basis by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who Trump described as “a very talented and respected Legal Mind.”
Read Also: Trump Threatens To Obliterate Kharg Island If No Deal
Bondi has been a staunch Trump ally but has drawn fire from some of his supporters for her handling of the release of the Justice Department files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
The Epstein affair has been a major political liability for Trump, who was a longtime friend of the disgraced financier.
Bondi has also reportedly drawn Trump’s ire by falling short with efforts to prosecute perceived Trump opponents such as former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
According to The New York Times, Trump may name former Republican congressman Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to be the next attorney general.
In the meantime, the post will be filled by Blanche, who was one of the personal lawyers who defended Trump in the multiple criminal cases he faced after he left the White House in 2021.
Bondi, in a post on X, said serving as attorney general had been “the honor of a lifetime” and said she will “continue fighting for President Trump” in her unspecified new private sector job.
“Over the next month I will be working tirelessly to transition the office of Attorney General to the amazing Todd Blanche,” she said. “I remain eternally grateful for the trust that President Trump placed in me to Make America Safe Again.”
Bondi’s ouster comes nearly a month after Trump fired Kristi Noem as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
Democratic lawmakers welcomed Bondi’s firing.
“Good riddance,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
“Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice became a cesspool of corruption,” Warren said. “Bondi will be remembered for blocking the release of the Epstein files.”
Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Bondi’s legacy “will be the weaponization of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency for Donald Trump’s personal benefit.”
Bondi joined Trump’s legal team during his first term impeachment trial, in which he was alleged to have pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to find political dirt on Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump was impeached by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives but acquitted by the Republican-majority Senate.
Bondi helped press Trump’s false claims of voter fraud after he lost the 2020 election to Biden.
She made television appearances on behalf of Trump and pushed to delegitimize vote counting in battleground states as part of the bid by the former president to overturn the results of the vote.
Bondi also criticized the criminal cases brought against Trump, appearing in solidarity at his New York trial, where he was convicted of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.
Bondi served as a prosecutor for 18 years before being elected Florida’s attorney general in 2010, the first woman to hold the post. She was reelected to a second term in 2014.
President Donald Trump escalated his ultimatum against Iran to its most explicit form yet on Monday, threatening to destroy Iran’s oil wells, power plants, desalination infrastructure, and its critical Kharg Island export hub if Tehran failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and accept a peace deal, as Iran dismissed the U.S. proposal as unrealistic, missiles continued striking across the region, and thousands more American troops arrived in the Middle East.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said the United States was in “serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME” in Iran to end military operations.
“Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched,’” he wrote. He said the action would be carried out “in retribution” for Iran’s killing of U.S. soldiers over the prior 47 years.
The threat was the starkest yet in a series of escalating warnings Trump has issued over the strait. International law explicitly bans making civilian sites the object of attack or reprisals. Yusra Suedi, assistant professor in international law at the University of Manchester, said Trump’s threat “reinforces the climate of impunity around collective punishment in warfare.” “This is clearly an act of collective punishment, which is prohibited under international humanitarian law. You can’t deliberately harm an entire civilian population to pressure its government,” she told Al Jazeera. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, asked about the legality of the threats, said the administration and U.S. armed forces would “always act within the confines of the law,” adding that Trump had made clear the United States had “capabilities beyond their wildest imagination.”
Read Also: Anti-Trump Protests Launch On ‘No Kings’ Day In US
Kharg Island, located roughly 15 miles off Iran’s coast in the Persian Gulf, handles approximately 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports, generating net revenue estimated at $53 billion in 2025, equivalent to 11 percent of Iran’s GDP. Its deepwater terminals can load up to 1.6 million barrels per day. Trump has expressed interest in seizing the island for decades: in a 1988 interview, he said he would “go in and take it” if Iran challenged U.S. forces. Asked earlier on Sunday by the Financial Times about his current intentions, he said his preference would be “to take the oil in Iran” and that the U.S. had “a lot of options.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei confirmed on Monday that Tehran had received Washington’s 15-point peace proposal via intermediaries following the Islamabad ministerial talks. But he described it as “unrealistic, illogical and excessive,” and reiterated that Iran’s position remained one of active self-defense, not negotiation. “We are under military aggression. Therefore, all our efforts and strength are focused on defending ourselves,” he said. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked who the administration was in contact with inside Iran, declined to identify the interlocutors, saying disclosure “would probably get them in trouble with some other groups of people inside of Iran.”
