After not doing very much to defend Matt Gaetz as Donald Trump’s first nominee for attorney general, the Media Research Center was a little more enthused with his replacement as nominee, Pam Bondi. Alex Christy huffed in a Nov. 22 post:
Journalism Professor Jason Johnson joined MSNBC’s Ari Melber on Thursday’s episode of The Beat to react to President-elect Donald Trump nominating former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to head the Justice Department after former Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew from the process amid a series of sex scandals. Johnson fretted that Bondi will be “worse than” Gaetz because “she knows what she’s doing” and is therefore “dangerous and effective.”
Given that Bondi was also one of Trump’s lawyers during his first impeachment trial and he has also nominated his criminal defense lawyers for other top DOJ positions, Melber declared, “So, if this were the team and they have to go through vetting and confirmation, but if this were the team, this would be two of the most politically defensive lawyers of the personal capacity of an incoming president we’ve ever seen running DOJ at the same time.”
Johnson regrettably concurred, “Ari, I completely agree, and quite frankly, my thought is that after Gaetz dropped out it would be essentially from Trump’s legal team. It would be like a Jay Sekulow or somebody like that. I assumed that’s where he would get these people from. Unlike William Barr, even going back to when we were all kids and, like, Janet Reno, right, occasionally attorney generals try to behave like they are not the personal lawyer of the president of the United States. That is completely out the window.”
He added that Bondi “is exactly what I was saying in the last segment that we should fear because she’s competent. We may not agree with her ideologically, but she actually knows how to do this job. So, if anyone on the Democratic side or anyone who cared about liberty or justice was thinking, ‘Well, maybe Matt Gaetz will screw this up and that will give us some time.’”
[…]Johnson’s comments are troublesome for two reasons. First, the journalism professor sounds like a liberal activist, which makes one wonder what kind of classes he is teaching. Second, the media can’t have it both ways: are Trump’s cabinet picks bad because they have no experience running large bureaucratic agencies or are they bad because they do and that makes them dangerously competent?
In his hate-watch of “The View” the same day, Nicholas Fondacaro played whataboutism to defend Bondi:
Oh how quickly folks in the liberal media forget their own misdeeds when it’s time to fling mud at the other side. That hypocrisy was again on full display during the Friday edition of ABC’s The View, when cloudy co-host Sunny Hostin lashed out at U.S. Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi. Hostin called Bondi an “election denier” when Trump was her client in 2020, that’s despite the fact that for six years, Hostin had maintained that President-elect Trump was an “illegitimate president” after his 2016 victory.
“I agree with you, Alyssa [Farah Griffin], [Matt Gaetz] would have been a very dangerous pick for the Department of Justice. But his new pick, Trump’s new pick, Pam Bondi. I believe she’s a dangerous pick, as well,” Hostin proclaimed. “She supported Trump’s false election claims. She was involved the efforts to overturn the results.”
Her evidence? Video of Bondi defending Trump’s candidacy the first two days after the election when many states had not finalized their vote counts.
Curtis Houck grumbled:
On Friday, ABC, CBS, and NBC used their flagship morning news shows to pivot away from former Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) withdrawing from the nomination fight to lead President Trump’s Justice Department towards deriding the new pick Pam Bondi as merely a “Trump loyalist,” foreign lobbyist, and former Florida Attorney General whose “tenure [was] not without controversy.”
Unsurprisingly, the Trump-hating ABC had Good Morning America put chief Washington correspondent and three-time anti-Trump author Jonathan Karl on the case, who said the important fact about Bondi is he’s a reflection of Trump “showing once again that among the top qualifications he is seeking for his cabinet is personal loyalty.”
[…]He later fretted that Bondi’s selection means Trump’s picks to lead the top three spots at the Justice Department (Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Emil Bove) and Solicitor General (John Sauer) have “all…worked in some way as his personal lawyer” and now will work for the American people.
Co-host Michael Strahan — who was picked given his stardom as an NFL player — kvetched in response that “it seems like he has a lot of personal relationships with everyone he is having join him.”
Houck seems not to understand that being a TV host is not the same as being the attorney general. He continued to whine that Bondi’s status as a Trump loyalist was called out:
O’Keefe resurfaced on CBS Mornings Plus and doubled down and, when he did bring up her time in Tallahassee, he argued the Trump “loyalist” used her post to go after ObamaCare and lobbying post-AG’s office.
Christy returned the next day to lay a Heathering job on conservative commentator David Brooks for being a unquestioning shill for Trump and Bondi:
On CBS Mornings, co-host Gayle King also tagged her as “one of his most loyal defenders, including his first impeachment trial” and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe led the characteristic of “longtime defender” before even getting to her past as the Sunshine State’s attorney general.
“The former two-term Florida attorney general defended Trump during his first impeachment trial and is now being asked to carry out his legal agenda,” he said.
It should be noted that the Post story also says looking at 2020 is “not at the top of the list” of priorities. As for Pam Bondi, she was Attorney General of Florida for eight years, so she is not some random, inexperienced hack. Nevertheless, Brooks agreed she will do what Nawaz feared, although he never mentioned her name in a rambling response, “Yes. These are anti-institutionalists. That’s the theme of the whole group of people.”
Despite the fact that the question was about Bondi and that she has no scandals swirling around her, Brooks claimed Trump wants people with scandals around him, “And so many have scandals because they are outside the pale of polite society. So there are not going to be a lot of the Trump appointees like Jim Mattis, who want to be liked, who want to do a responsible job for the government. When you pick somebody who has a sex scandal or a financial scandal, they are totally on your side, because they have no other route to a career in their lives.”
Mark Finkelstein had a meltdown over one particular commentator:
What’s next, MSNBC? Will you bring in Michael Avenatti, on a Zoom from his federal prison cell, as your expert on lawyer-client ethics?
The question arises because, of all the 330 million people in the United States, Saturdays’ edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend chose Marc Elias to attack Pam Bondi — Trump’s AG nominee — as a 2020 “election denier,” and someone who had suggested the existence of “fake ballots.”
This is the same Marc Elias who is fresh from his failure to steal the Pennsylvania senatorial election for his client, Democrat Bob Casey. As the National Review described it, “Casey’s strategy — spearheaded by his counsel, Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias — has turned to seeking to count illegal ballots.”
In service of Elias’s larcenous strategy, three counties counted ballots that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled to be illegal.
[…]Prior to Elias’s comments, the show rolled a 2020 clip of Bondi on Fox News, in an exchange with Steve Doocy, saying she would fight till Trump was declared the winner of Pennsylvania, and suggesting there could have been fake ballots cast there. So the irony and hypocrisy of inviting Elias—of all people—to condemn Bondi as an election denier is compounded by the fact that the very state where he acted to steal an election by relying on illegal ballots was . . . Pennsylvania!
Elias had the chutzpah to declare that, now more than ever, Dems need to speak with “moral clarity.”
The Weekend hosts, predictably, were way too diplomatic to mention Elias’s attempt to steal the Pennsylvania election, and his nerve in accusing anyone else of being an election denier relying on fake ballots.
Finkelstein then melted down over another criticism of Bondi:
This was not the only bit of stunning hypocrisy during the segment’s attack on Bondi. Co-host Alicia Menendez quoted Stephen Colbert to the effect that Bondi “is the only person to ever make money off Trump University.”
That was a reference to the Trump family foundation having made a $25,000 to Bondi’s campaign for a second term as Florida AG at a time her office was deciding whether to investigate Trump University, something her office ultimately decided not to do.
So Menendez, via Colbert, was unsubtly accusing Bondi of accepting a bribe.
Needless to say, that’s exactly what Finkelstein would call it if Bondi and Trump were Democrats, making that same unsubtle allegation.
None of these MRC writers, by the way, disputed that Bondi was an election denier — they were just angry she was called out on it.
This two-day blast of posts, by the way, was pretty much the extent of the MRC’s defense of Bondi, which is not much more than it did to defend Gaetz.