Name: Pam Bondi removed from role as attorney general
Uploaded: 2026-04-02T17:26:32.167Z
Duration: 3 min 40 s
Description: President Donald Trump has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, news outlets have reported. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has been tapped as acting interim attorney general. Trump is reportedly considering Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, as a replacement for Bondi.

President Donald Trump has fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, news outlets have reported. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has been tapped as acting interim attorney general. Trump is reportedly considering Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, as a replacement for Bondi.

Washington

Pam Bondi has been removed from her position as attorney general of the United States, according to a White House official. Todd Blanch has been named as the acting interim attorney general and is expected to make a public statement regarding his appointment.

The removal comes amid reported tensions between the White House and the Department of Justice, especially concerning the release of the Epstein files. The administration has expressed frustration over the pace of legal actions against political rivals, and the new acting attorney general will face the challenge of balancing presidential expectations with legal standards.

Pam Bondi removed from role as attorney general

Right here, we do have some breaking news out of Washington. Eamon Jabbers has that story for us. Eamon. Leslie, a White House official confirming to our colleagues at MSNOW that Pam Bondi has been removed as the Attorney General of the United States. The White House official telling MSNOW just in the past couple of moments that the new acting interim Attorney General will be Todd Blanch, and he is expected to post about this on social media in a short time. So we'll wait for the official statements as to why this happened, but there have been increasing tensions between the White House and the Department of Justice, particularly over the Epstein files, going back to all the way, you know, early last year, when Pam Bondi promised to release Epstein files, staged a sort of a meeting with a bunch of MAGA folks who were enthusiastic about releasing the Epstein files, gave them documents that didn't really live up to their billing, and then started a cycle of frustration around the Epstein story that ultimately ended up in President Trump being pressured to agree to release everything that the DOJ knew about Epstein, and that massive document dump that we saw at the end of last year. So that was one point of tension. We'll see what the White House says and what the Department of Justice says in the moments to come. But for now, what we know is that Pam Bondi is out as attorney general and Todd Blanch is in, in what they're calling acting interim attorney general. Leslie, back over to you. Yeah, Eamon, thank you so much for that. It does appear, based on reports, that those tensions have been simmering for a while. What do we know about Todd Blanch, especially as it pertains to some of the frictions that had been reported behind the scenes? Does he solve any of that? Yeah, one of the questions is going to be, how does he navigate this very tricky situation now, where the president clearly wants indictments and criminal convictions of people that are his political enemies? He's pushed for that. You saw him over the weekend, I think, at one point, on one of the days this weekend, the president posted on social media 14 consecutive times about Letitia James, somebody, a political rival who he has said has committed crimes. The president wants those cases to move forward. The problem that, you know, line prosecutors have faced so far is that they can't match the evidence that they can bring to trial with what the president has insisted is out there, and that makes it very difficult to get their subpoenas through, to get grand juries to move forward with indictments. And it will get—it could be difficult to move forward with convictions if they can get these cases across the line. And none of that seems to matter to the president, who is frustrated that he hasn't seen the kind of convictions that he wants. And I think anybody who takes this job next is going to face a very tricky dynamic of trying to both please a president and move forward on the basis of the law and find himself in a very tricky political situation. And that is a different kind of Department of Justice than we've seen before. Previous administrations have always, you know, bent over backwards to suggest, even if there was politics at play behind the scenes, to suggest that the Department of Justice was independent from the president's desires. This administration hasn't really bothered with that nicety as much. The president has signaled publicly what he wants, and we've seen the Department of Justice do that. It does seem like, in this case, Leslie, ultimately the president got frustrated that the reality on the ground wasn't moving as fast as he wanted it to.

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Breakdown