Trump attorney general pick Pam Bondi: 5 things Jews should know
Pam Bondi said she has been to Israel several times
Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who Trump picked to lead the Justice Department, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference meeting on Feb. 23 in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
By Lauren Markoe November 22, 2024
Pam Bondi, president-elect Donald Trump’s new nominee to lead the Justice Department, has touted her pro-Israel credentials and called out antisemitism on the left. She has said less, at least in public, about threats to Jews from the right.
Bondi is from Florida, the state with the third-largest Jewish population, and is expected to face few obstacles to confirmation. She is a Trump loyalist who served from 2011 to 2019 as the first female attorney general of Florida, and now works as a lobbyist at the same firm as Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
Bondi, 59, replaces former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as Trump’s nominee for attorney general. Gaetz withdrew from consideration Thursday amid controversy over reports that he had sex with a minor and used illegal drugs, among other allegations.
Here are five things to know about Bondi related to Jews and Israel.
She wants to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters and reinstate Trump’s ‘travel ban’
Shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Bondi was on Newsmax, the conservative cable network, and suggested federal officials get tougher with pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses and revoke the visas of those who are not U.S. citizens.
“Frankly, they need to be taken out of our country or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away,” she said.
On the same program, Bondi said she was concerned that the protesters were “out there saying ‘I support Hamas’ — that’s not the same as saying, ‘I support all these poor Palestinians who are trapped in Gaza.’” (Very few protesters openly expressed support for Hamas.)
She called antisemitism “rampant” in the U.S. and said it’s “heartbreaking to see what’s happening to all of our Jewish friends in this country.”
She also called for the reinstatement of “President Trump’s travel ban immediately.”
Trump in his first term instituted a travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries. Many Jewish groups opposed the ban, which Trump has said he intends to bring back when he returns to the White House. The Supreme Court upheld a modified version of the ban, but President Joe Biden revoked it on the day he was inaugurated.
She is a registered lobbyist for Qatar
After two terms as Florida’s attorney general, Bondi in 2019 joined Ballard Partners, a top Republican lobbying firm, as a partner in its Washington, D.C., office.
Among her clients, according to news reports, she is a registered lobbyist for the government of Qatar, the Gulf state that has long been a refuge for the leaders of Hamas, and is involved in brokering a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel.
In hopes of pressuring Hamas and restarting stalled peace talks, Qatar last month agreed to a U.S. request to kick Hamas out of the country.
Bondi’s other clients include Uber, Amazon, General Mills and the Florida Sheriffs Association.
She said Israel may be the US’s ‘greatest ally’
On a Fox News program in May 2018, Bondi applauded then-President Trump for moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that outraged Palestinians and their supporters.
Israel is “one of our — if not our — greatest allies in the world,” she said.
She has also called Israel “one of our greatest allies” at other times.
She’s been to Israel several times and peered over the border into Syria
On that same Fox News show in 2018, Bondi said she had been to Israel twice as Florida’s attorney general.
And during a panel discussion after Trump left office, Bondi said she had been to Israel “multiple times,” including a trip where her guides “took us to Golan Heights,” and she peered over the border “with binoculars looking into Syria, and saw an ISIS flag.” Such a visit is not uncommon for politicians, generally toured by members of the Israeli military.
“That camp was shut down,” Bondi said, “because Donald Trump was president.”
She did not elaborate on the camp or explain how Trump supposedly eliminated it. The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to emailed questions about Bondi’s trip to Israel and the camp she spoke of.
Also during the panel discussion, which was captured in a video posted Thursday to the social platform X (formerly Twitter) Bondi criticized President Joe Biden for not building on the Abraham Accords. The agreements, brokered in Trump’s first term, normalized relations between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan.
A Jewish opponent accused Bondi’s campaign of undermining him with Jewish voters
Dan Gelber, a Jewish state senator running against Bondi for Florida attorney general in 2010, said Bondi’s campaign was behind mailers to Jewish voters that called him “toxic to Jewish education” because he opposed school vouchers. The flip side of the mailer declared, “Dan Gelber: On the record against scholarships to help our needy children attend Jewish private schools.”
Bondi repeatedly denied that she was behind the mailer, which was distributed by the Committee for Florida’s Education, an electioneering communications firm. Bondi’s campaign spokesperson at the time, according to a news report, was married to a leader in a national pro-voucher group that gave $225,000 to the Committee for Florida’s Education, the group’s only donation.
Politifact, which is affiliated with The Poynter Institute, a journalism training group, criticized the mailer’s “crass twist of logic” for conflating Gelber’s opposition to vouchers with an opposition to Jewish education.
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