By C. Ryan Barber and Sadie Gurman

Pam Bondi told senators she would end the "weaponization" of the Justice Department if confirmed as Donald Trump's attorney general, echoing the incoming president's own complaints about the agency she could soon oversee.

"I will fight every day to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice," Bondi said in opening her confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "That partisanship, the weaponization will be gone."

Bondi, a loyalist who has long been by Trump's side, wouldn't explicitly say that he lost the 2020 election, saying she accepted the results, but saw evidence of election fraud when she visited Pennsylvania after the 2020 election.

The 59-year-old former prosecutor is facing intense questioning from Democratic senators over her willingness to reshape the Justice Department more fully into an arm of Trump's agenda.

Democrats and other critics worry she will wield the department as a weapon to go after his perceived enemies, including former special counsel Jack Smith, who prosecuted Trump twice before dropping the cases after the election.

"At issue is your ability to say no," said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the committee's ranking Democrat.

Trump and his allies have complained for years that the Justice Department has unfairly targeted him for political reasons, and they see Bondi as someone willing to reshape it more fully into an arm of his agenda.

"If people don't trust that their elected officials will faithfully enforce the law or administer equal justice under the law, they've lost faith in America," Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) said. "That disturbs me greatly, and I know it does you, too."

Bondi made her name as Florida's attorney general, a role she held from 2011 to early 2019. In 2016, she initially backed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for the Republican presidential nomination, but after he dropped out, she endorsed Trump. "We have been friends for years," she said of Trump at the time, "and I know his family personally."

She has ascended in Trump's circle ever since.

Months after her tenure as state attorney general ended, she joined the legal team that defended Trump in his first impeachment. A year later, she traveled to Philadelphia to monitor ballot counting in a crucial swing state. At a news conference the day after the election, Bondi said Trump had "won Pennsylvania, and we want every vote to be counted in a fair way."

More recently, she was among a group of Republicans who went to New York in May to support Trump in his hush-money criminal trial, which resulted in the former president's conviction on 34 felony counts.

As a telegenic surrogate for Trump and a regular on Fox News, she has railed against the criminal cases against him and called for retribution against the prosecutors behind them.

"The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones," Bondi said on the network in 2023. "The investigators will be investigated."

Asked about that comment during Wednesday's hearing, Bondi dismissed the remark. "I said that on TV," Bondi said.

Democrats have little chance to derail her nomination but are already pressing her about the depth of her loyalty to Trump, her views about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and her role in the former president's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. They are also likely to question her on her work dating back to 2019 as a lobbyist at Ballard Partners, where her client roster has included Amazon.com and the governments of Qatar, Kosovo and the Dominican Republic.

"The president-elect has made it clear that he values one thing above all else in an attorney general: loyalty. I have no reason to believe President-elect Trump has changed his litmus test for attorney general or his views on how the Justice Department should operate. In fact, I fear he found someone who can pass his loyalty test," Durbin said in a speech this week.

In Bondi, Trump chose an attorney general nominee who cuts a more conventional figure than his first choice, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from consideration under a cloud of sexual-misconduct allegations. Senate Republicans are using their questioning to tout Bondi's credentials as a two-term state attorney general and former prosecutor and to complain about perceived abuses by the Justice Department.

In answering a written Senate questionnaire, Bondi emphasized her prosecutorial experience, listing several murder cases among some of the most significant matters she has litigated. Since 2021, she has led the litigation arm of the Trump-linked America First Policy Institute, a role she acknowledged could present conflicts of interest in light of cases the think tank has filed against federal agencies. Bondi said she would consult Justice Department ethics officials.

Bondi's confirmation would cap a remarkable rise that began with her election in 2010 as Florida attorney general. A Tampa-born graduate of Stetson University College of Law, she ran for state attorney general as a relative political neophyte and became the first woman elected to the role.

She promised to protect consumers, crack down on pill mills in the state and fight then-President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare bill.

"No legislation in our history alters the balance of power between Washington and the states so much as ObamaCare does," Bondi wrote in a 2011 Wall Street Journal opinion piece after her election.

For other top Justice Department posts, Trump has nominated lawyers from his own criminal defense team who have accused Smith as recently as last week of improper and unethical behavior. It will take time to get those people through the Senate confirmation process.

In the interim, Trump's Day 1 leadership plan for the Justice Department remains in flux less than a week before he takes office, with many picks for acting roles not yet solidified, according to people familiar with the process.

Write to C. Ryan Barber at ryan.barber@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 15, 2025 11:19 ET (16:19 GMT)

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