CNN Senior legal analyst Elie Honig slammed Attorney General Pam Bondi over her brazenly partisan display during the Signal national security leak controversy surrounding the Donald Trump administration.
Earlier this week, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that he was accidentally added to a Signal group chat about bombing Houthi targets in Yemen by Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. In the chat, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive information, including timings for airstrikes against the Houthis before they began.
Trump has stood by Hegseth and Waltz despite calls for their resignation and other members of the administration have fallen in line, including Bondi.
This week, Bondi signaled that a criminal investigation into the chat leak is unlikely to take place.
The AG repeated the administration’s talking points before pivoting to attack two Democrats, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden, who were investigated but never charged for allegedly mishandling classified information.
In an interview with CNN on Friday, Honig slammed Bondi for her blatantly partisan dismissal of the Signal chat leak which he says is unbecoming of the country’s top law enforcement official.
“Here we have a very high stakes, complicated set of facts,” he said. “It cries out for a fair and impartial investigation by the nation’s leading law enforcement agency. Instead, what the attorney general has done is – with zero investigation, with zero facts – she comes out and decrees that the facts are exactly as Donald Trump would wish them to be.”
Honig said that while he initially supported the idea of Bondi serving as AG because she is “qualified on paper” her true test was whether “she can exercise independence.”
“Right here she has failed miserably,” Honig said. “That statement was something much more like you’d hear from a White House press secretary than the nation’s top law enforcement officer.”
