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It was only a matter of time. The writing has been on the wall for months for Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, who was unceremoniously fired on Thursday after 14 months leading the justice department. Trump was rumored to be unhappy with Bondi; frustrated at the slowness and failures of some of her prosecutions of his political enemies, angry that she could not make the Epstein scandal go away, and disappointed by her rather wooden performances on TV. For a while, it looked like Bondi would be the first cabinet secretary that Trump fired in his second administration – something he has been much more reluctant to do since returning to office in early 2025. But in October, when she was called to testify before a Senate subcommittee, Bondi made sure to issue vicious insults to her Democratic interrogators in front of the news cameras; she made a similar performance in February at a House judiciary committee hearing, where she lobbed ad hominem attacks on Democrats, including calling Representative Jamie Raskin “a washed-up loser lawyer.” These performances evidently endeared Bondi to Donald Trump enough that he decided to keep her around for a while; Kristi Noem, his onetime secretary of homeland security, became the first cabinet member to be fired in his second term. But the Epstein story persisted, and so did Trump’s dissatisfaction with his own mounting unpopularity ahead of the November midterms. He is not capable of blaming himself, and so he looked around for someone else to punish for his own failures. Pam Bondi was there. The move is unlikely to have Trump’s desired effect. The firing of Pam Bondi will lead to renewed scrutiny of the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, a story that had faded from the headlines in recent weeks following the start of Trump’s war on Iran, but which now threatens to return to forefront of national attention. Only about half of the Epstein files have been released to the public so far, in defiance of a law passed by Congress late last year. The fallout of the Epstein scandal has raised questions about the justice department’s redaction choices and about why certain documents were or are still being withheld from publication. This includes the redaction of powerful men’s names from the Epstein emails, and the choice to withhold files pertaining to one woman’s allegations, made over a series of four interviews with the FBI, that Donald Trump attempted to sexually assault her when she was between 13 and 15 years old. Trump has denied the claims, and Bondi has denied wrongdoing in the handling of the Epstein documents. But the Trump administration and its officers lie so frequently that many Americans do not give these denials great weight. Under Bondi’s tenure, the justice department, once an institution fiercely defensive of its independence, became a tool for the president’s political whims. Specifically, Trump tasked Bondi with weaponizing the department against his longtime enemies. But with little evidence of wrongdoing or criminality, Bondi’s justice department has often been unsuccessful in securing indictments, let alone convictions, against the likes of James Comey, John Bolton, Adam Schiff, Letitita James, John Brennan or Jerome Powell. These failures are more reflections of the limits of the justice department’s power than of Bondi’s unwillingness to corrupt the institution to serve Trump’s personal whims; nevertheless, the president was reportedly frustrated that Bondi had not been able to throw more people he dislikes in jail. Meanwhile, Bondi helped eviscerate the department, which is now a shadow of its former self. She gutted the civil ights division, the sector that once worked to enforce equal rights, voting rights and antidiscrimination law. Every lawyer involved in previous criminal investigations of Trump was fired, resigned or retired, according to Bondi’s deputy Todd Blanche; 6,000 lawyers resigned rather than work toward her priorities. Trump gave little rationale for his choice to terminate Bondi. In the Truth Social post that functioned as the official presidential statement announcing her departure, he said only that she would be “transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector”. She will be replaced as interim attorney general by Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer and the justice department official who met with the Epstein madam Ghislaine Maxwell in prison shortly before Maxwell was moved to a different prison facility with more lenient security. If the idea was to try to shed some of the liabilities of the Epstein scandal by firing Bondi, the move seems likely to backfire. After all, it was not Bondi who was photographed repeatedly with Epstein; not Bondi who drew him a lewd birthday card; and not Bondi who gave a now infamous quote to New York Magazine, saying that Jeffrey Epstein liked women “on the younger side”. It is that person, not Pam Bondi, who entangled Donald Trump in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. It’s that guy who needs to lose his job. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist