The Transactional World of Pam Bondi

During her eight years as Florida attorney general, the cop was apparently off the beat when Bondi succumbed to the enticements of corporate lobbyists.

When Pam Bondi, President Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney general, was the state attorney general of Florida, she was one of the best money can buy.

Despite the fact that a state attorney general’s job is to represent the public interest—not private, special interests—Bondi routinely took the side of corporate fraudsters and polluters during her two-term tenure that ran from 2011 to 2019, coincidentally after receiving political donations, free trips, and other generous perks from interested parties.

A prime example of one of these alleged quid pro quos came up in the news coverage following Trump’s announcement that he had selected Bondi to replace his first choice, Matt Gaetz, to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer. In 2013, Bondi abandoned the idea of joining the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against Trump University after a Trump family foundation donated $25,000 to a pro-Bondi political action committee.

The Senate should take a closer look at the circumstances surrounding that incident when considering her appointment. But it also should keep in mind that it was not a one-off. It was emblematic of a pattern of behavior.

Wining and Dining

In the fall of 2014, The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by Eric Lipton examining the upsurge in corporate lobbying of state attorneys general. The first installment, “Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General,” featured Bondi front and center. At the time, she was chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), an organization founded in 1999 with the primary purpose of electing Republican attorneys general.

Lipton found that state attorneys general had become “the object of aggressive pursuit by lobbyists and lawyers who use campaign contributions, personal appeals at lavish corporate-sponsored conferences and other means to push them to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements or pressure federal regulators.” He even discovered cases where attorneys general used legal briefs drafted by private lawyers nearly verbatim and relied on them to provide much of the research as well as the cost of litigation in exchange for a percentage of any settlement.

That “aggressive pursuit” Lipton described goes both ways. According to emails and documents obtained by the nonpartisan Center for Media and Democracy, Republican attorneys general offer lobbyists and lawyers private, confidential meetings in exchange for contributions to RAGA, which—as a 527 political organization—can raise unlimited amounts of cash from individuals and corporations. Another RAGA document, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group Documented, detailed the degree of access funders get at RAGA conferences, retreats and summits depending on how much they spend on their annual RAGA membership fee, which in 2019 ranged from $15,000 to $250,000.

This explosion of lobbying and dealmaking, Lipton pointed out, has taken place largely behind closed doors, because “unlike the lobbying rules covering other elected officials, there are few revolving-door restrictions or disclosure requirements governing state attorneys general.” Although state laws generally require corporate lobbyists to register if they are trying to influence legislation, there are no explicit rules when it comes to lobbying attorneys general.

Bondi Cashes In

Bondi first appears in the Times story when she was at a RAGA retreat at an exclusive California resort where rooms cost as much as $4,500 a night. She was joined by other RAGA members as well as representatives from lobbying firms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and such Fortune 500 companies as Altria, Comcast and Pfizer.

RAGA members’ airfare, meals and hotel bills for such events are generally paid by the corporate sponsors or state taxpayers. Corporate donors, Lipton found, had provided Bondi nearly $25,000 worth of airfare, hotels and meals for RAGA-sponsored events during the previous two years. Florida taxpayers, meanwhile, had covered nearly $14,000 in Bondi’s expenses since she took office in 2011 to go to meetings hosted by the nonpartisan National Association of Attorneys General and the Conference of Western Attorneys General, where corporate lobbyists were also in attendance. In a statement, Bondi told the Times that the financial support she had received for these events, either directly or through RAGA, did not have any influence on her decisions as attorney general.

The Times story went on to cite several examples when Bondi, after lobbying by the Dickstein Shapiro law firm, declined to investigate its corporate clients’ unethical practices that other state attorneys general deemed illegal. The firm’s clients included Accretive Health, whose bill collecting operations had been shut down by Minnesota’s attorney general for abusive practices; Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit online school whose sales pitches, according to Iowa’s attorney general, were “unconscionable”; and Herbalife, the maker of nutritional drinks and other products, which settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 2016 to pay $200 million back to people who the company conned with misleading moneymaking claims.

Besides mingling with Bondi at RAGA conferences and treating her to expensive dinners, Dickstein Shapiro lawyers helped place a cover story on Bondi in InsideCounsel, a magazine for corporate lawyers, and sponsored a fundraising event in 2014 for Bondi at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

When contacted by the Times about her reluctance to pursue the cases involving Dickstein Shapiro clients, Bondi said in a statement that her encounters with the firm’s representatives had no impact on her decisions and insisted that her office “aggressively protects Floridians from unfair and deceptive business practices.”

Killing the Clean Power Plan

The second installment in Lipton’s Times series, “Energy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General,” was based on thousands of pages of correspondence between energy industry executives and Republican attorneys general trying to block Obama administration proposals to address the climate crisis. In 2014 alone, Lipton found, the fossil fuel industry donated some $16 million to at least a dozen Republican attorney general candidates.

Apparently it was money well spent. As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported, less than two weeks after representatives from fossil fuel companies, electric utilities, and their trade groups attended a RAGA conference in August 2015, Bondi and more than 20 other state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to kill the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have established the first-ever limits on U.S. power plant carbon emissions. Among the conference’s attendees were lobbyists from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal industry trade group now called America’s Power, which gave RAGA $378,250 between 2015 and 2016; Charles Koch’s Koch Industries, which donated $350,000; coal giant Murray Energy, which contributed $250,000; and Southern Company, which gave RAGA $85,000, according to materials reviewed by CMD.

Bondi also benefited directly from corporate lobby firm and fossil fuel industry largess. In the run up to her fall 2010 victory through her two four-year terms as Florida’s attorney general, her campaigns raised nearly $397,000 from lawyers and lobbyists (who lobbied on a range of issues) and more than $46,000 from the energy sector, including electric utilities and such oil and gas companies as Chevron and Koch Industries, according election finance data compiled by Follow the Money. Forty percent of the nearly $6 million Bondi’s campaigns raised came from the Florida Republican Party, which in 2015—when Bondi and her colleagues challenged the Clean Power Plan and the last year she served as RAGA chair—received $775,000 from lawyers and lobbyists and more than $800,000 from the energy sector.

In an October 2015 opinion column in The Florida Times-Union, Bondi maintained that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had no legal authority to impose the Clean Power Plan and that it would have resulted in higher electricity bills across the country. Four months later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a controversial 5 to 4 ruling, blocked the plan (and Trump EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, repealed it in 2017), but Bondi’s assertion that replacing fossil fuel-powered electricity with renewables would lead to higher bills has been proven wrong.

According to a July 2024 analysis by Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, a nonpartisan think tank, “Since 2010, residential electricity rates have not increased faster than inflation, while electricity bills have declined in inflation-adjusted terms. Many of the states with the largest increases in wind and solar generation since 2010—including Iowa, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma—have seen rates rise slower than inflation.” Energy Innovation found that the key drivers of rising electricity rates have been the cost of fossil fuels, combatting wildfires, and transmitting and distributing power.

Climate Crisis? What Crisis?

Bondi justified challenging the Clean Power Plan as a bipartisan effort, although only a couple of the 27 state attorneys general who signed onto the lawsuit were Democrats. She also insisted she was just protecting her constituents.

“Let me tell you who we are looking out for: We are looking out for consumers,” Bondi told reporters. “And we will continue to look out for our consumers and our businesses, especially when this affects their finances. That’s what this is about.”

If Bondi were really serious about protecting her constituents, however, she would have joined the District of Columbia and the 15 states that backed the Obama administration and were ready to begin complying with Clean Power Plan rules. After all, Florida is the most vulnerable state to climate change.

How bad will it likely get? Florida is currently the second hottest state, and the South Florida is projected to experience the biggest increase in the number of hottest days across the country. Palm Beach County, for example, projects that by 2040, it will suffer 35 to 49 days with temperatures over 95 degrees annually. By 2070, that number could be between 81 and 112 days, according to the county’s estimates.

At the same time, routine flooding is already a major problem, and by the end of the century, some 1 million Florida homes will be at risk. That’s largely because the state sits on porous limestone and the sea level around the state, which has gone up 8 inches since 1950, could rise another 14 to 16 inches by 2050, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Meanwhile, the state has been hit by 52 billion-dollar extreme weather disasters since 2010. About 40 percent were caused by hurricanes, which have been turbocharged by rising levels of carbon emissions. One of the most recent, Hurricane Ian, slammed into the state’s Gulf Coast in September 2022, causing more than $112 billion in damages. It was the costliest hurricane in Florida’s history and the third-costliest in U.S. history, according to a 2022 NOAA report. This year, three hurricanes made landfall, two of them less than two weeks apart.

Regardless, Pam Bondi doesn’t like to “philosophize” about climate change. In October 2015, when she announced Florida was joining other states in suing the Obama administration over the Clean Power Plan, a Politico reporter asked her if climate change was “man-made.” Bondi replied: “I’m not going to get into a philosophical discussion with you about climate change.”

She then pivoted to defend the lawsuit, saying that the plan would be costly for Florida’s consumers and businesses. The reporter pressed her again, asking her about her take on climate change and “whether it was an issue of science rather than philosophy.” Bondi refused to take the bait. “I’m not going to get in a discussion about climate change right now,” she replied.

Florida Rolled Back Environmental Safeguards

Bondi’s opposition to the Clean Power Plan and other Obama-era EPA air pollution proposals, including a new rule for power plant startups and shutdowns, was also legalistic. Although the Clean Air Act grants the federal government the authority to set pollution standards, she maintained it is the states’ responsibility to implement them. “States play an important role in protecting air and water,” Bondi wrote in her October 2015 Florida Times-Union column, “and state attorneys general in particular have long been the last line of defense to protect states against gross federal overreach.”

States do have an important role in protecting the environment, but according to a September 2014 Tampa Bay Times editorial, the record of the Rick Scott, the governor when Bondi was attorney general, was “an environmental disaster,” and the paper was only referencing his first four years in office. His second term, according to many accounts, was just as bad.

“Scott has bulldozed a record of environmental protection that his Republican and Democratic predecessors spent decades building,” the Tampa Bay Times editorial noted. “He weakened the enforcement of environmental laws and cut support for clean water, conservation and other programs. He simultaneously made it easier for the biggest polluters and private industries to degrade the state’s natural resources. While the first-term Republican attempts to transform himself into an environmentalist during his re-election campaign, his record reflects a callous disregard for the state’s natural resources and no understanding of how deeply Floridians care about their state’s beauty and treasures.”

There are too many examples of Scott trashing Florida’s environmental safeguards to list here, but there are a few that are notable for their outrageousness.

· Shortly after Scott—a hard core climate science denier—took office in 2011, Florida Department of Environmental Protection officials issued a directive barring thousands of employees from using the terms “climate change,” “global warming” and “sustainability.”

· Scott later denied he banned the terms, but he closed down the Florida Energy and Climate Commission, which was established by his predecessor Charlie Crist to implement policies reducing carbon emissions and preparing for climate change-related impacts.

· Scott also killed funding for Florida Forever, the state’s landmark conservation program that Gov. Jeb Bush created in 2001. The program was reauthorized in 2008, but in 2011, Scott called for eliminating it, and it was completely defunded in 2016.

· A year later, he approved Florida House Bill 989—the so-called “anti-science law”—which enables legal challenges to teaching the realities of climate change in state classrooms.

When asked by a reporter in 2014 if he thinks man-made climate change is real and significant, Scott famously replied with the standard Republican mantra: “I am not a scientist.” More recently, after Hurricane Helene blew through Florida in September, Scott—who has been representing Florida in the U.S. Senate since 2019—acknowledged that the climate is “clearly changing.” However, when asked by a CNN anchor if Helene was part of a trend in which storms “are simply bigger than they once were, perhaps because of climate change,” he replied: “Who knows what the reason is, but something is changing. Massive storms. Massive storm surge. So we’ve got to figure this out.”

Bondi Failed to Do Her Job

According to the nonpartisan National Association of Attorneys General, a state attorney general’s duty is to represent the public interest by, among other things, protecting consumers from fraud, regulating utilities, enforcing environmental laws, and instituting civil suits.

Bondi did the exact opposite: Instead of protecting the people of Florida, she failed to prosecute corporate fraud and defended the fossil fuel industry at the expense of public health and the environment.

As attorney general, Bondi oversaw her office’s Consumer Protection Division, which is charged with protecting “consumers by pursuing individuals and entities that engage in unfair methods of competition or unconscionable, deceptive, or unfair practices in trade of commerce.” During her eight years as attorney general, the cop was apparently off the beat when Bondi succumbed to the enticements of corporate lobbyists.

Florida has already sustained billions of dollars in climate change-related damage. Regardless, Bondi routinely joined—and spearheaded—lawsuits and other actions to block federal environmental safeguards, especially those designed to mitigate the impact of global warming. Why? At least partly—if not largely—because the organization she chaired, the Republican Attorneys General Association, received massive financial support from fossil fuel companies, electric utilities, and their respective trade groups.

As a state’s top legal officer, attorneys general are supposed to function as the “people’s lawyer,” representing the interests of state residents. All swear to faithfully discharge their duties. By failing to prosecute corporate fraud and putting the interests of the fossil fuel industry ahead of the health and safety of her own constituents, did Pam Bondi violate her oath of office?

Elliott Negin, Money Trail’s executive editor, was previously the managing editor of American Journalism Review, the editor of Public Citizen and Nuclear Times magazines, a news editor at NPR, and a regular contributor at HuffPost.