CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi for sounding more like a “press secretary” than the country’s top law enforcement official.
Honig appeared on The Lead with guest host Phil Mattingly, who mentioned Honig’s recent article in New York Magazine about the Signal security leak. The leak was revealed by The Atlantic on Monday, which reported that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat with Trump administration officials discussing airstrikes on Yemen. The conversation included details about the planned attacks, shared by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Despite the leak, President Donald Trump and his administration responded by attacking the media and not firing anyone involved.
Honig wrote, “It’s certain that Bondi and everyone else in DoJ leadership knows what happened. Yet I feel confident predicting that the Justice Department won’t lift a finger to investigate this mess.”
Mattingly played a clip of Bondi’s response to a reporter who asked if her department would investigate the leak. Bondi said, “First, it was sensitive information, not classified. And inadvertently released. And what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission.”
Honig responded, pointing out that Bondi’s answer proved his point.
“We have a very high-stakes, complicated situation,” he said in a clip highlighted by Mediaite. “It clearly calls for a fair and thorough investigation by the top law enforcement agency in the country. But instead, the attorney general has come out, without any investigation or facts, and declared things exactly as Donald Trump would want them to be. She says, ‘There’s no classified information.’ But that’s highly questionable.”
He also pointed out that while Bondi seemed qualified on paper when she was appointed, she needed to prove she could act independently. He then said, “I have to say, when Pam Bondi was nominated, I came on air and said she’s absolutely qualified on paper to be the attorney general. But the real test is whether she can act independently. And right now, she has failed miserably. That statement sounds more like something you’d hear from a White House press secretary than the nation’s top law enforcement officer.”
You can watch the video on Mediaite.
