AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: On Thursday, six Trump nominees faced Senate combination hearings: Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state; John Ratcliffe for head of the CIA; Russell Vought for budget director; Sean Duffy, a climate crisis denier, for transportation secretary; Chris Wright, a fracking executive and Trump’s pick for energy secretary; and Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general.

At Bondi’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she avoided directly answering questions about Trump’s vow to pardon January 6th defendants and refused to say Trump definitively lost the 2020 election. Bondi vowed not to politicize the Justice Department but refused to commit to maintaining independence from Trump and his possible requests to prosecute journalists or other perceived threats.

AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as President Biden used his farewell address in the Oval Office Wednesday night to warn Americans about growing threats to democracy.

For more, we go across the country to Los Angeles to David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect. His recent piece is headlined “Pam Bondi and the Pay-to-Play Justice System.”

Thanks so much for being with us, David. As you write about your adopted city in flames, let’s talk about what’s happening in D.C. Who is Pam Bondi? And talk about the questions she was asked and her refusal to say that President Biden was, in fact, fairly elected, just said “he is president” and stood by that, not to mention other issues.

DAVID DAYEN: Yeah. Pam Bondi was the attorney general of Florida from 2011 to 2019. After she left, she immediately became a corporate lobbyist, where she served over 30 corporate clients. During her time in office in Florida, she reversed many of her predecessor’s investigations, at least in part because they were donors to her campaign. She even stopped an investigation into Trump University, the for-profit college entity that he was using to defraud students, after she received a $25,000 gift from the Trump Foundation. So, Bondi clearly has a comfort level with basing her prosecutorial discretion on whether someone has power and influence, and whether they’re willing to give her a taste of that.

And that’s my biggest fear. Obviously, if you run the Justice Department, you have a powerful entity of the state to seek punishment against a corporate offender, or any offender, or to, you know, give them a break. And the fact that she won’t break with Trump, that she was a powerful surrogate for Trump on the campaign trail, that she was Trump’s lawyer in 2020 in Pennsylvania looking into alleged election irregularities, that shows a real fusion between the Attorney General’s Office and the presidency. And, you know, Bondi controls that department — or, when she does, if she’s confirmed, Trump can threaten people to get in line with his agenda, under threat of some sort of punishment. And Bondi has shown herself very willing to go along with that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, David, you’ve gone through a list of companies that could potentially directly benefit from her position. She was, as you pointed out, a lobbyist for Amazon. She also lobbied for GEO Group, the private prison firm that stands to gain from Trump’s immigration policies. So, if you could elaborate?

DAVID DAYEN: Sure. There are dozens of criminal, civil, and otherwise, investigations against corporations that are left over from the Biden Justice Department. And so, what Pam Bondi is going to do with that is really completely up to her. Amazon is under a federal investigation by the Justice Department right now; Boeing, which engaged in deception around the 737 MAX crashes. Private prison firm CoreCivic is under a civil rights investigation right now, and Bondi was the lobbyist for GEO Group, which is their main rival. And both of those companies stand to gain from Trump’s mass deportation policies. And there’s a host of others, including active antitrust investigations against Apple and Google and Nvidia and Live Nation-Ticketmaster and several others, Visa, among others. And so, Bondi is going to have a lot of power here to decide whether or not to move forward on all of these investigations.

And many of these companies under this investigation are the ones giving millions to Donald Trump’s inauguration. So you can see the real conflicts of interest here. And, you know, while Bondi has sort of said that she would recuse from any investigations involving companies she personally worked for, she has not extended that to say she would recuse from investigations from the company, the lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, that she worked for. So did the Trump chief of staff, Susie Wiles. And so, you know, there could be companies that have relationships with her colleagues, her former colleagues, that she would not recuse herself from making decisions on those. So, I think it’s a very dangerous situation.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to Pam Bondi speaking on Fox News in 2023.

PAM BONDI: The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Pam Bondi. “The investigators will be investigated.” “The prosecutors will be prosecuted.” David Dayen, the significance of this, of not refusing to say whether she’d investigate Jack Smith, whether she’d keep an enemies list? She said there will be no enemies list, despite what the nominee for FBI is saying.

DAVID DAYEN: Well, it’s very dangerous, and she’s shown herself willing to take on prosecutors within her own department. When she was Florida attorney general, the two highest-level prosecutors, who were investigating foreclosure fraud, the use of mass documents, fake documents, in foreclosure cases to take people out of their homes, were working at the Florida Attorney General’s Office. And they were investigating someone who was — Lender Processing Services — a key donor to Bondi. And so, when she got into office, she fired those two high-level prosecutors. So, she has no problem doing something like that. And when she says, “We’re going to investigate the investigators and prosecute the prosecutors,” you know, this is the extension of the Trump intimidation and bullying scheme into the Justice Department. And it’s the very weaponization that he decried, and her, as well. So, yeah, I think it’s a difficult thing to take a look at.

AMY GOODMAN: And they kept bringing up Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI, though he’s supposedly independent, not clear whether any of these people will be independent from President Trump. We have 15 seconds.

DAVID DAYEN: Yeah, 100%. The lack of independence is what Democrats focused on in that hearing. She kind of deflected, did not give major answers on that. And so, that uncertainty continues.

AMY GOODMAN: David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect. We’ll link to your article, “Pam Bondi and the Pay-to-Play Justice System,” and also your writing on the L.A. fires. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, for another edition of Democracy Now!