Pam Bondi fell silent, refusing to answer, when a senator pressed her on whether Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
The confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general was dominated by questions about Bondi’s independence from the president-elect. But perhaps none of her responses was more telling than one she offered to Marie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii.
“I want to ask you a factual question,” Hirono began. “Who won the 2020 presidential election?”
“Joe Biden is the president of the United States,” responded Bondi, refusing to contradict the false claim maintained by Trump that the election was rigged against him.
“I can say that Donald Trump won the 2024 election. I may not like it, but I can say it. You cannot say who won the 2020 election,” Hirono fired back.
Bondi, looking at the senator, pursed her lips and said nothing.
“It’s disturbing that you can’t give voice to that fact,” Hirono said.
Hirono’s question wasn’t the only time that Bondi, who previously served as Florida’s attorney general and later was a corporate lobbyist, was pressed to disavow Trump’s lie.
She offered a similarly evasive response to Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, when he asked whether she was willing to admit that Trump lost to Biden in 2020.
“President Biden is the president of the United States,” Bondi said. “He was duly sworn in, and he is president of the United States. There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office, and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024.”
Bondi wasn’t willing to leave it at that, though.
“What I can tell you,” she added, “is what I saw first hand, when I went to Pennsylvania as an advocate for the campaign. I was an advocate for the campaign, and I was on the ground in Pennsylvania, and I saw many things there… I saw so much.”
Bondi offered no specifics on what exactly she saw.
“I think that question deserved a yes or no,” Durbin responded. “And I think the length of your answer is an indication you weren’t prepared to answer yes.”
In November 2020, she spoke at a Trump news conference in Philadelphia—directly after Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani—supporting his efforts to claim victory.
“We are thrilled to have won Pennsylvania with 87 percent of the vote in,” she said at the time. Biden ended up winning the state by a 1 percent margin.
Bondi, who defended Trump from impeachment as part of his legal team in 2019, also raised eyebrows when she denied to Durbin that she had heard the infamous recording of Trump urging Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” in January 2021.
Although she claimed she hadn’t heard the tape, she suggested to Durbin that Trump’s words were “taken out of context.”
Throughout the hearing—though she at one point vowed to not let politics influence her work at the Justice Department—Bondi made clear her persisting fealty to the president-elect.
