President Trump said he “would love to have her in my administration.” She left for K Street instead.
After two terms as top cop in the Sunshine State, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi will find a home with Ballard Partners, a lobbying powerhouse with close connections to the president.
Bondi makes the move north to lead the company’s corporate regulatory compliance practice, Politico reported. According to a press release, while there she “will focus on serving Fortune 500 companies to implement best practices that proactively address public policy challenges such as human trafficking, opioid abuse and personal data privacy.”
To be sure, Bondi worked on each of those issues during her time in Tallahassee. Bondi also cozied up to Trump before and during his political rise. Whoever hires her will have a powerful ally on good terms with the White House. Those advantages, however, don’t come without significant controversy.
Bondi solidified her stock with Trump in March of 2016. By then former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had dropped out of the Republican primary altogether, but, rather than throw her support behind the state’s chosen son, the attorney general backed Trump over Sen. Marco Rubio.
“As attorney general, I look around this country and this world, and it frightens me now — and it should frighten all of us,” Bondi said per the Washington Post. “We live in a changing world, and we need leadership. We need someone who is unafraid to lead and restore America to its greatness. And today I am proud to endorse Donald Trump.”
The next day, March 15, Trump thumped Rubio, winning more than twice as many votes as he and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, received combined.
There seems little chance that Bondi would have endorsed anyone besides Trump, in retrospect. He had held a fundraiser for her two years earlier at his swanky Palm Beach club Mar-a-Lago. The Trump Foundation also wrote a pro-Bondi PAC a check for $25,000 a year before that in 2013. That payment would create controversy and become the substance of one of Hillary Clinton’s most damning attacks against Trump, made as it was around the same time Florida was considering whether to join a New York lawsuit against Trump University. With Bondi at the helm, the Florida attorney general’s office decided not to join the lawsuit.
An agency spokesman would later tell the Tampa Bay Times that Bondi was not involved in the decision-making process and that Assistant Attorney General Mark Hamilton passed on the case because New York’s lawsuit was on behalf of consumers across the country and “no further action need be taken.”
The timing and the money remain controversial. Bondi’s pull with this president, however, is undisputed.
