President-elect Trump’s attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, was once caught up in a legal dogfight with a Louisiana couple over a pooch named Tank — and was even accused of stealing the beloved canine.
The sordid spat goes back to 2005, when Tank’s owners, Steve and Dorreen Couture, put the St. Bernard in an animal shelter in Louisiana to ride out Hurricane Katrina.
Tank was later turned over to the Pinellas Humane Society in Florida and ultimately adopted by Bondi, 59, who renamed him Noah, The Tampa Bay Times reported.
Bondi was a prominent animals rights activist during her time as Florida’s attorney general — often bringing bow-tie clad rescue dogs to cabinet meetings — and supported a ballot measure to ban dog racing in the Sunshine State in 2018, the Naples News reported.
Tank was one of thousands of dogs separated from their owners during the catastrophic storm, which destroyed tens of thousands of homes and led to 1,392 deaths.
The Coutures eventually tracked down Tank to the Tampa Bay area and Bondi in 2006, but the Florida prosecutor did not want to return the animal, according to the outlet.
Bondi argued Tank had been “severely neglected” and abused while in the care of the Coutures and contended it would be better if the dog stayed with her.
“He was dying from heartworms. They had filled his heart,” she told the St. Petersburg Times. “I took a dog who was a walking skeleton. That’s what was wrong with him before the hurricane.”
“If I thought I was sending him to a stable environment, where he would be cared for, as hard as it would be, I’d put him in my car and drive him back myself,” Bondi said.
The Coutures denied accusations of neglect, claiming the heart-worm issue had been a longterm medical condition, and eventually sued Bondi demanding the return of Tank.
The legal drama lasted 16 months and played out on CNN, Fox News and the pages of People magazine.
The two sides settled shortly before the case came to trial, and while the terms were not disclosed, the Coutures got their dog back.
And though things officially ended amicably, the couple and Bondi swiftly fell out of touch.
“She stole my dog,” Dorreen Couture, who died in October, told the St. Petersburg Times in 2010 from her rebuilt Louisiana home.
In Bondi’s successful campaign for Florida attorney general in 2010, she insisted the matter was settled and that she had received a “tremendous amount of support from people and animal rights activists” over the issue.
