Bondi’s Clemency Shift Raises Question on Policy Approach (1)

As Florida attorney general last decade, Pam Bondi played a central role restricting voting rights for felons and served on a state board that sparingly granted inmates second chances.

Then as a lawyer in President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration, Bondi facilitated some of Trump’s late-term decisions to reduce sentences or pardon dozens of prisoners.

Now, as she awaits likely Senate confirmation to serve as his attorney general, Bondi’s divergent record has criminal justice experts waiting to see how she approaches key sentencing and prison reform debates. Supporters say Bondi has evolved to embrace rehabilitation and reentry, but critics can’t get past her less-forgiving roots.

Which approach prevails could influence the Trump administration’s balance between felon compassion and criminal crackdowns.

“There are many conveniences in shifting her tone around the clemency process. It is a process that benefits Trump and benefits his friends who have broken the law,” said Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of the Black-led Florida voting rights organization Equal Ground who also was Kamala Harris’ 2024 state campaign director. “It allows her to maintain employment and favor with” Trump.

As Justice Department leader, she’d be tasked with further implementing the 2018 First Step Act, which was intended to reduce the federal prison population; coordinating with the White House on clemency strategy—including for Jan. 6 defendants; and determining whether to depart from her predecessor’s memo urging prosecutors against charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences.

Her openness to pardons came after bipartisan passage of that criminal justice overhaul, as Trump and some conservatives began moderating their party’s historically punitive focus.

Brett Tolman and Alice Marie Johnson, who said they worked closely with Bondi on a White House clemency advisory group in 2020, saw her evolve from hard line law-and-order politician.

Bondi studied the facts of each case and relaxed her stance, such as to those subject to draconian punishments for drug offenses, they said.

They’re optimistic that she’ll apply those lessons in fixing a broken clemency system moving the outside DOJ to streamline application reviews and other incarceration issues she’d oversee as the nation’s top law enforcer.

“It’s reshaped how she’ll be looking at criminal justice reform as an AG,” said Johnson, a criminal justice advocate whose sentence was commuted by Trump.

Controversial Pardons

Bondi’s temporary role in the White House counsel’s office overlapped with a period when the Trump administration was criticized for prioritizing allies for clemency.

In 2020, Trump credited Bondi’s support when shaving 27 years and millions in penalties off the sentence of a Medicare fraudster whose claim rose to the White House through her prison friendship with a woman linked to Kim Kardashian. Trump also noted Bondi’s blessing when pardoning a corrupt Palm Beach County politician who’s the sister of Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard.

Ballard is also Bondi’s current boss.

Former Palm Beach Commissioner Mary McCarty received a Bondi-endorsed pardon in December 2020. By then, Bondi had returned to Ballard’s lobbying firm, following a hiatus to join the White House.

John Kastrenakes, who prosecuted McCarty, said he found nothing improper about the pardon, which he described as a “political process.”

However to Melba Pearson, director of prosecution projects at Florida International University’s Institute for Public Policy, Bondi helped Trump make decisions in which “if you got his ear, you were able to get clemency.”

“That to me says the process is fundamentally broken,” she said.

Trump transition spokespeople handling media requests for Bondi didn’t provide a comment.

Bondi said at her confirmation hearing on Wednesday that “more can be done” with the First Step Act, noting it was imperative to reduce recidivism and “fix” the Bureau of Prisons, which she said has been mismanaged.

“President Trump’s leadership on criminal justice reform has demonstrated what’s possible when a president is unafraid to do things that have been deemed to be too difficult,” Bondi said. “We have to reach across the aisle and get solutions for all of these problems.”

Political Shift

Johnson pointed to the “regular, everyday people” who Trump also pardoned. She said Bondi was genuine in assessing applications to consider legal merits and public safety risks of lenience.

Tolman, a former US attorney and now the executive director of Right on Crime, recalled Bondi becoming attuned to the significant increase in female defendants and “inordinately long” drug sentences.

“That’s a great development,” he added, “where you start out as a prosecutor and you’re hard charging and you feel like you’re making a huge difference on the war on drugs, only to learn that there’s a totally different side.”

Yet others see politics.

More recently, Trump has leaned into tough-on-crime rhetoric, including stating that he’ll order DOJ to “vigorously pursue the death penalty.”

“She’s going to follow the president-elect’s agenda to the letter,” said Pearson, a former Miami prosecutor. “I don’t see her making her own path.”

Felon Voting

When serving with then Gov. Rick Scott (R) on Florida’s clemency board, Bondi reviewed inmate appeals and almost never granted their wishes, lawyers who tracked the board’s activity said.

Some observers still saw her eventually appreciate nuances of the system.

“Over time, it appeared as though Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi recalibrated her perspective without necessarily changing it completely,” said Mark Schlakman, senior program director for the Florida State University’s Center for the Advancement of Human Rights. That included support for state legislation easing paths to employment for ex-inmates.

But her legacy on returning citizens is largely defined by one of her initial acts as state AG—instituting a minimum five-year waiting period before Florida’s 1.4 million convicts could vote.

She justified the decision in a March 2011 op-ed by blaming the state’s preceding Republican administration for its 2007 decision to remove barriers for released felons to immediately return to the polls.

A ballot initiative overturned the policy in 2018, but efforts under Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) have undermined that measure’s intended impact, voting rights activists say.

Howard Simon, who recently retired as executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said Bondi’s restrictions on felon voting, which he described in an email as “THE civil rights issue in Florida,” are still most paramount in understanding her philosophy.

Simon remembered a meeting Bondi agreed to take with him and an NAACP leader shortly after she became attorney general. Simon asked her to reconsider the forthcoming voting policy that she’d already previewed.

“She was a rigid, ideological wall of ‘no,’” he said.