Pam Bondi Tries to Use Alex Pretti’s Murder to Push Trump’s Stolen Election Lies

In January 2025, as President Donald Trump unveiled the lineup of reactionary dead-enders and disgraced conservative media personalities who would eventually comprise his Cabinet, the Washington Post editorial board sought to triage the names a bit. And Pam Bondi, whom Trump tapped to serve as Attorney General after his first choice, former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, turned out to be a vile sex pest, was one of the “acceptable” nominees whom the board deemed worthy of swift Senate confirmation. “Florida’s former attorney general is qualified,” the board wrote about Bondi. “Lawyers who have worked with her report that she is serious.”

Over the past year, Bondi has taken every opportunity to prove the board wrong. She pushed to dismiss criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his cooperation with Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. She announced the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, a longtime Trump nemesis, just a few days after Trump demanded on social media that she do exactly that. She opened an investigation into Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minnesota woman whom federal agents shot and killed earlier this month, after Trump called Good a “professional agitator” and promised to “find out who’s paying for it.” 

Numerous Justice Department employees have resigned rather than go along with these and other half-baked prosecutions that Bondi obediently initiated at Trump’s request. In August, the journalist Ruth Marcus wrote that Trump had found in Bondi what he did not have during his first term: “an ally who will bend the [Justice Department] to his will and punish his political enemies.”

The person Bondi chose to take over the Comey prosecution, a bumbling former insurance lawyer named Lindsey Halligan, finally had to step down last week after an exasperated federal judge called her appointment as an interim federal prosecutor a “charade” that “must come to an end.” Now, Halligan is reportedly no longer employed by the Justice Department in any capacity, which clears the way for her to reprise her 2012 cameo on South Beach Tow, a scripted truTV show about (as far as I can tell) handcuffed tow truck drivers engaging in half-assed slapfights.

Perhaps Bondi’s simplest task—if not logistically, then just in terms of the plain-language requirements of federal law—was publicly releasing the Justice Department’s files related to the late Jeffrey Epstein by a December 19 deadline imposed by Congress. In February 2025, Bondi teased that Epstein’s client list—ostensibly, the names of all the famous men who’d assaulted women and girls Epstein had provided to them—was “on my desk.” Yet a few months later, the Justice Department asserted that no such list even exists, and although the department eventually released a few small, heavily redacted batches of files late last year, Bondi recently told a federal judge that more than 99 percent of the Epstein files are not public, and there is still no timeline for their release. I am sure the fact that her boss’s name appeared repeatedly in those initial documents is a coincidence.

Bondi’s transformation of the Justice Department into Trump’s legal hit squad reached its natural conclusion on January 24—the same day federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, while he directed traffic on a Minneapolis street. In a letter sent that morning to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Bondi argued that “out of control fraud” in Minnesota has imperiled “election security,” and demanded that Walz turn over the state’s voter rolls for immediate inspection. Doing so, Bondi argued, would “boost confidence in the rule of law” and perhaps help “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.” This is a polite way of insinuating that summary executions will continue until the president gets what he wants.

If you are a normal person, the relationship between masked government agents murdering people and the contents of Minnesota’s voter rolls is probably not obvious. But again, Bondi’s primary qualification for the job she holds is her willingness to adopt any and all of Trump’s demented grievances as her own. Despite losing Minnesota in the presidential elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024, Trump has continued to insist that he won the state all three times, and that Minnesota’s “crooked” and “corrupt” leaders robbed him of the Electoral College votes that were rightfully his. Bondi originally earned Trump’s trust by being one of his most vocal cheerleaders on this subject in 2020, stubbornly pushing his stolen-election conspiracy theories at a time when even some Fox News hosts were trying to persuade her to give it a rest. 

During Bondi’s Senate confirmation hearings last year, she pointedly refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election, and would say only that Joe Biden was, at the time, serving as President of the United States. In doing so, Bondi laid out a blueprint for Trump’s judicial nominees who have stuck to this same talking point, because if you are a Republican lawyer right now who aspires to a position of power, there is nothing more important than signaling to Trump that your personal loyalty to him will always come first.

Now that Trump is president again, he is eager to exact revenge on those whom he imagines wronged him in the last election (and the election before that, and the one before that, too). Minnesota is one of the nearly four dozen states that the Justice Department has sued for their voter registration lists, including driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers. But so far, federal judges have been swatting away these lawsuits with relative ease. One judge in California, correctly clocking the lawsuit as part of the Republican Party’s efforts to further disenfranchise voters who threaten its political power, called the DOJ’s request “unprecedented and illegal,” and a threat to “the right to vote which is the cornerstone of American democracy.” 

Bondi’s letter to Walz, then, is best understood as a hamfisted gambit to win at least one of these cases the easy way—to bring Minnesota to heel by dangling before the state’s governor the possible withdrawal of bloodthirsty secret police from the streets in exchange for his unconditional surrender. You are effectively looking at a ransom note printed on Justice Department letterhead; on his Election Law Blog, the law professor Rick Hasen called the letter an “outrageous and reprehensible” bit of evidence that ICE is in Minneapolis not “for law enforcement or immigration purposes,” but to “stir up shit in blue states.” 

The occupation of Minneapolis and the killing of Alex Pretti have together revealed many of the intertwined strands of the conservative movement: Its rank xenophobia, its affinity for brute force, its willingness to look you in the eye and tell you the stupidest, most insulting lies you’ve ever heard. Bondi’s attempt to further leverage the violence she helped unleash demonstrates her commitment to reimagining the Justice Department as Trump’s personal law firm. Under her leadership, its job is to enforce only the laws Trump wants her to enforce, and only against people and places that make him upset.