Jason Cohen
Democratic Florida state attorney Dave Aronberg Friday commended President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Trump announced Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general, as his choice Thursday shortly after Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz removed himself from consideration. Aronberg, on “Morning Joe,” recalled Bondi hiring him as Florida’s “drug czar” despite his Democratic affiliation, suggesting that her loyalty to Trump would not interfere with her dedication to law enforcement.
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“Thank you for bringing up the traumatic experience of my statewide election loss in 2010. So I ran for attorney general, lost in the Democratic primary. Pam Bondi was running at the same time on the Republican side. She likes to say that she beat me and then she hired me. That gives me too much credit,” Aronberg said. “I didn’t even make it to the big game because I lost in the primary. But then, even though I endorsed my Democratic opponent who ran against her in the general election, she still appointed me as drug czar to go after the pill mills, the opioid epidemic. And we shut down all those pill mills that made Florida the drug supplier for the rest of the country.”
Trump praised Bondi’s efforts “to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs” in his Truth Social announcement and said she “will refocus the DOJ [Department of Justice] to its intended purpose of fighting Crime.”
“So she reached across party lines, she got a lot of criticism for it from some of her fellow Republicans. There’s this one story I like to say where there was a party leader in southwest Florida who got in her face and thought he could be so bold to put a finger in her face and say how dare you appoint Democratic Dave Aronberg to this position,” Aronberg continued. “And then she responded by putting a finger in his face. And so she had my back, she was loyal. She’s no one’s patsy. And the fact that she’s loyal to her friends and people who work for her is an explanation of why Trump picked her, because she is loyal to Donald Trump. But this loyalty, this love for Donald Trump, is a real love.”
“She’s a true believer. But with that said, she’s also someone who believes in the rule of law. She was a prosecutor for 20 years. She was attorney general for eight years, and even though, you know, she engaged in political rhetoric, I do not believe she will be Matt Gaetz 2.0,” he added. “She is not going to burn it all down. She is not going to put forward fake charges to go after Trump’s enemies.”
Gaetz announced earlier on Thursday that he was withdrawing from consideration for attorney general, writing on X that his nomination had “unfairly become a distraction” to Trump’s transition efforts.
Trump recently selected his criminal defense attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove to serve as deputy attorney general and principal associate deputy attorney general. He also named Dean John Sauer, who presented oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, as solicitor general.
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