The Senate voted 54–46 on Tuesday to confirm Pam Bondi, who will now take the helm of the Justice Department at a time when it is dramatically shifting priorities to align with President Donald Trump’s agenda and while the FBI is in a state of unease over recent, sweeping personnel actions.
All Republicans voted in favor of her confirmation, while all but one Democrat voted against it, underscoring the divided views on Bondi’s fierce loyalty to Trump and the changes already taking shape at the DOJ. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) was the lone Democrat to support Bondi.
Ahead of the vote, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) urged his Democratic colleagues to support her, citing how many Republicans supported former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s nomination.
“There’s no doubt that Ms. Bondi is highly qualified. In Committee, several of my Democratic colleagues even acknowledged as much,” Grassley said. “She’s qualified for the job, and she represents mainstream views shared by at least the 77 million Americans who voted for change on November 5th.”
Bondi was a state prosecutor for two decades before becoming Florida’s first female attorney general in 2010. She endorsed Trump in his 2016 presidential election and defended him in his first impeachment case. She also vouched for some of Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election during an appearance in Pennsylvania, alongside his then-attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Senate Democrats repeatedly pressed Bondi during her confirmation hearing about her views on the 2020 election, and she asserted that Joe Biden won, despite alluding to unspecified election integrity concerns in Pennsylvania.
Bondi also vowed to work independently of Trump in the face of Democrats grilling her on whether she was capable of telling the president “no.”
“I believe that the Justice Department must be independent and must act independently,” Bondi said at her hearing, adding that “politics will not play a part.”
Her confirmation comes as the DOJ’s acting department heads have already made dramatic adjustments internally, lurching the department’s focus toward immigration enforcement, freezing activity in the Civil Rights Division, and opening rare internal inquiries into the DOJ’s wide-ranging Jan. 6 investigation and the thousands of employees who worked on it.
FBI employees, meanwhile, have been rattled by the DOJ’s acting No. 2 head, Emil Bove, ousting eight of the most senior employees at the bureau and demanding names by Tuesday of the thousands of employees who interacted with Jan. 6 cases.
Committee ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) cited Bondi’s close alliance with Trump and the recent upheaval at the department as reasons to vote against her.
“I have serious doubts about her willingness to really say no to this president,” Durbin said ahead of the vote. “This concern is even more pressing because, over the last 16 days, the Trump administration has purged dozens of senior career law enforcement officials at the Department of Justice and at the FBI.”
A spokesman for Bondi told the Washington Examiner she will be sworn in on Wednesday.
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Bondi is the 11th member of Trump’s Cabinet to be confirmed. Unlike the incoming attorney general, some of the president’s other nominees, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, enjoyed widespread bipartisan support for their confirmations.
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was narrowly confirmed despite intense opposition from Democrats. Forthcoming votes for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s respective nominees to serve as health and human services secretary and the director of national intelligence, are expected to be similarly partisan.
