President-elect Donald J.Trump quickly swept aside Thursday’s bad headlines about Matt Gaetz by speedily substituting Pam Bondi, a fellow Florida Republican with a starkly different profile — but a similar reputation for fealty — to be his attorney general.Ms.
Bondi, 59, is a lobbyist and Trump loyalist who served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019.She has charted a more conventional and less clamorous course than Mr.
Gaetz, with little of the ugly personal or political baggage that led some Republicans to oppose Mr.Gaetz’s nomination.She was a local prosecutor.Ms.
Bondi, the daughter of the mayor of a small Tampa-area municipality, began working as an assistant state attorney in Hillsborough County in the 1990s.During 18 years as a prosecutor, she tried cases “ranging from domestic violence to capital murder,” according to the bio page at her lobbying firm.She supervised a handful of high-profile cases, most notably one involving the former New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden, who served a one-year prison sentence for violating probation in a drug case in 2006.She was elected Florida’s first female attorney general in 2010.Ms.
Bondi — a Democrat until 2000 — emerged from a crowded Republican primary to win the attorney general’s race after garnering the support of Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and failed 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, and by touting her tough stance on crime during appearances on Fox News.During her eight-year tenure, she tried unsuccessfully to overturn and weaken the Affordable Care Act, opposed expanding legal protections for the L.G.B.T.Q.community and cultivated a national reputation by supporting anti-human-trafficking efforts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
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