Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Bondi’s missteps, missed opportunities
Pam Bondi’s time as Florida attorney general is coming to a close, and not a moment too soon.
What a disappointment she’s been.
First elected in 2010, Bondi was a toughtalking Tampa prosecutor and a fresh face on the scene.
She quickly revealed herself as a pure partisan, a quality that’s especially unseemly for an attorney general whose job is to seek justice, not political advantage.
Let’s review some of the lowlights (in no particular order):
Bondi asked the governor to postpone a man’s execution so it wouldn’t fall on the night of a campaign event at her waterfront home in Tampa. Scott obliged.
Her office kept appealing a federal judge’s ruling that Florida’s ban on samesex marriage was illegal, until the Supreme Court finally put the matter to rest. As a parting shot, she fought against paying legal fees of the gay couples who had sued for the right to get married.
She joined with other attorneys general to fight against clean water and clean air measures. In one instance, she jumped into a legal fight that opposed efforts to clean up Chesapeake Bay.
She was a staunch defender of the Gov. Rick Scott doctrine that ex-felons should grovel for the right to vote after paying their debt to society. (Sixty-five percent of Florida’s voters set her and the governor straight in November.)
Bondi accepted some $51,000 in travel freebies from the Republican Attorneys General Association, which got its money from corporate sponsors.
Early in her tenure, Bondi’s office forced out two top-notch investigators who had won praise for going after companies that were fraudulently foreclosing on homeowners.
Bondi wasted taxpayers’ time and money by trying to defend the state’s ban on smoking medical marijuana.
As her office was reviewing complaints about getting scammed by Trump University, Bondi’s campaign cashed a $25,000 check from Donald Trump, then did nothing about the complaints.
There’s more, but space is limited.
One of the themes that emerges is Bondi’s lack of judgment by using her office’s resources to eagerly jump into cultural and political wars, as the examples above illustrate.
And make no mistake, Bondi is a political creature. She made countless appearances on various Fox News shows, including a stint where she abandoned her duties as attorney general for three days so she could co-host a Fox show called “The Five.”
Even when she was right, she was too often late to the game.
For example, Bondi and the rest of the Florida Cabinet for years ignored the injustice of the Groveland Four, a group of young black men wrongly accused of raping a young white woman in 1949. The Cabinet could have pardoned the men anytime, including at its last meeting earlier this month. They did nothing, and Bondi left the meeting without taking any questions about a pardon.
After that meeting, Bondi asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to review the case. Great, but why the delay? Why punt? This should have been easy, especially for a statewide official who is elected specifically to administer justice.
Bondi also waited too long to launch in investigation into sexual abuse by Catholic priests, acting in October but only after a bombshell report by a Pennsylvania grand jury. Sexual abuse by priests hasn’t exactly been a hidden problem.
Bondi’s signature accomplishment will be her focus on opioid abuse, specifically her efforts to halt the widespread dispensing of drugs through “pill mills.” It’s clear she felt passionately about the problem and worked hard to fight it, but why does that stand so alone at the end of an eightyear run?
Which brings us to newly elected Attorney General Ashley Moody, who will take office in early January. Like Bondi, she hails from Tampa and her family has deep roots in Florida. Also like Bondi, Moody got degrees from the University of Florida and Stetson Law, and she’s a fairly fresh face on the statewide political scene.
We hope the comparisons end there. We hope Moody will exercise sound judgment, stay out of political fights and keep a sharp focus on justice for all of Florida’s more than 21 million residents.
Unlike her predecessor.