Pam Bondi, Donald Trump’s pick for Attorney General, has learned the fine art of not answering important questions, especially regarding who won the 2020 election. She refused to answer when Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) pointedly asked her whether Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
As noted by The Daily Beast, Bondi’s confirmation hearing centered around her loyalty towards the President-elect. But Hirono’s questioning makes it more than clear that she’s unwilling to confirm Biden’s election win.
“I want to ask you a factual question,” Hirono started. “Who won the 2020 presidential election?”
“Joe Biden is the president of the United States,” Bondi said, thereby avoiding the false claim maintained by Trump that the election was rigged.
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But Hirono wasn’t having it.
“I can say that Donald Trump won the 2024 election. I may not like it, but I can say it. You cannot say who won the 2020 election,” Hirono retorted, frustrated. “It’s disturbing that you can’t give voice to that fact.”
Bondi still refused to say anything.
“It’s disturbing that you can’t give voice to that fact,” Hirono said.
Bondi, who previously served as Florida’s attorney general and later became a corporate lobbyist, was similarly evasive when questioned by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin (D). He asked her whether she would admit that Trump lost to Biden in 2020.
She trotted out a similar but more extended version of the same answer.
“President Biden is the president of the United States,” she told the senator. “He was duly sworn in, and he is president of the United States. There was a peaceful transition of power (Jan. 6 was peaceful? Really? Wow.) President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024.”
That’s not all she had to say, however.
“What I can tell you,” she added, “is what I saw firsthand when I went to Pennsylvania as an advocate for the campaign. I was an advocate for the campaign, and I was on the ground in Pennsylvania, and I saw many things there… I saw so much.”
The funny thing is, she had nothing to say about what she saw.
Durbin pressed on, stating, “I think that question deserved a yes or no. And I think the length of your answer indicates you weren’t prepared to answer yes.”
So Bondi has joined Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, in
skirting questions. He dodged questions about his drinking, extramarital affairs, and, more worrisome, whether he would avoid an order to shoot protesters.
Bondi, obviously Trump’s girl, spoke in November 2020 at a Trump news conference in Philadelphia, right after Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani spoke to bolster Trump’s efforts to declare victory.
“We are thrilled to have won Pennsylvania with 87 percent of the vote in,” Bondi said. That’s nice, but Biden won the state with a 1 percent margin. She also served as part of his legal team while fighting impeachment in 2019. She piqued Durbin when she denied she’d heard the notorious recording of Trump pushing Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” in January 2021.
She claimed she hadn’t heard the tape and that Trump’s words “were taken out of context.”
As the hearing wore on, Bondi vowed that she would not let politics influence her work at the Justice Department, but I don’t think those of us who watch the goings-on are that naive. Everything she’s said so far shows that she’s just another Trump minion who’ll kowtow to him whenever possible.
It’s just Trump 2.0, where many highly unqualified people will soon be making major decisions about our daily lives.
It’s time for us to buckle our seatbelts.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
