The Trump administration goes by its own sets of laws—those it likes and those it doesn’t. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Florida’s gift to bad government, is a conspicuous example.
On Thursday, following an ICE agent’s killing of 37-year-old Renee Good the day before, Bondi warned protesters not to obstruct or impede federal agents as they continue their immigration crackdown. That would hardly seem out of place, especially given that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem smeared Good as a domestic terrorist.
But Bondi demanding compliance before any lawbreaking by protesters is the same thing for which her own FBI is investigating six members of Congress who called on our military not to obey unlawful orders. That hypocrisy is illustrative of Bondi’s time as attorney general from day one.
### Undermining Enforcement from the Start
On Bondi’s first day in office, she crippled enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and abolished the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, exposing the nation to all sorts of improper influences. Her silence tacitly endorses the president’s pardons of financial criminals the Justice Department had worked honorably to convict.
Letting white-collar thieves walk erases their court-ordered restitution along with their prison time.
### The Moore Case: A Disturbing Example
To little notice, it has come back to light that Bondi interrupted a criminal trial in Utah last July by ordering prosecutors to drop all charges against a physician accused—and by his own words, guilty—of defrauding the United States.
Aiding anti-vaxxers, Kirk Moore, a plastic surgeon, had received more than 2,000 free COVID-19 vaccine doses from the government during the pandemic in 2021. He threw them away and issued the cards that had come with them to people who wanted to flout vaccine mandates.
In some cases, he admitted, he gave children saline shots instead of the vaccine because their parents asked him to, so they could tell teachers they had been vaccinated.
Moore wore a “Trump 2024” bracelet on a gold chain when he met with reporters and came off as a full-bore vaccine denier, referring to the lifesaving formulations as “bioweapons.” He claimed the vaccines “failed in every animal test,” a widespread canard that the Food and Drug Administration has categorically refuted.
“Dr. Moore gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so. He did not deserve the years in prison he was facing. It ends today,” Bondi wrote on Elon Musk’s X the day she called off his trial.
### Still No Answers
Since then, she has refused any explanation, according to a *ProPublica*-Salt Lake Tribune report. She acted, it said, on the same day she received a letter from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, calling for Moore to be “celebrated, not prosecuted.” Bondi met in Washington with the lawbreaker and his fiancé a few days later.
*ProPublica* reported that Moore was one of at least 12 health professionals charged with giving or selling fraudulent COVID-19 cards. Others pleaded guilty. Some went to prison, and some licenses were suspended or revoked, as they deserved. One who had lost an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is now exploring a presidential pardon.
Bondi forgave a crime that had put people’s lives at risk and cheated the government of vaccine doses that could have been given to others.
“This undermines every layer of the system that protects us from infectious disease,” Brian Dean Abramson, an immunization law expert in Virginia, told *ProPublica*. “Vaccination policy relies on accurate records and honest medical participation.”
### Unlawful Orders and Hypocrisy
As attorney general, Bondi can ask Congress to amend or repeal laws with which she finds fault. It is emphatically not her job to repeal them by executive fiat.
The *New York Times* revealed another example of Bondi’s hypocrisy. She has the FBI investigating six members of Congress for their perfectly truthful social media posts telling members of the military that they must refuse unlawful orders. Trump himself said they deserved to be killed for it.
But Bondi herself asserted the duty to refuse in a 2024 friend-of-the-court brief. It urged the Supreme Court to rule, as it did, that a president cannot be prosecuted for actions relating to official duties. The decision effectively threw out a federal indictment charging him with crimes for the Jan. 6 riot and other attempts to upset the 2020 election returns.
In a lower court argument, one of Trump’s lawyers, D. John Sauer—now Bondi’s solicitor general—had appeared to concede that such immunity would allow a president to order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival. Not to worry, Bondi’s brief said. The military would not obey such an order.
### The Duty to Disobey Illegal Orders
At the time, before she was attorney general, Bondi was a lawyer for the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank founded by key figures from Trump’s first administration.
If she was speaking the truth then about the duty to disobey illegal orders, as she was, she should be speaking it now.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2026/01/08/bad-law-worse-government-thats-pam-bondi-editorial/
