Not Independence, It’s Control”: Klobuchar Grills Bondi on Justice Department Freedom

At a tense Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Senator Amy Klobuchar pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi on a fundamental issue: whether the Justice Department is truly free from presidential pressure, or whether prosecutions are being steered from the White House.

The hearing was Bondi’s first appearance before the panel since she was confirmed earlier this year, after promising senators that she would keep politics out of the Justice Department and preserve its traditional independence.

Klobuchar came prepared to test that promise in public, step by step.

A Promise of Independence Meets a New Reality

During her confirmation, Bondi assured senators that “politics will not play a part” in her decisions and that the department would act independently, guided only by facts and the law. She also vowed to “end the weaponization” of the department and restore what she called a “one-tier system of justice for all.”

Klobuchar opened her questioning by reminding Bondi of those commitments and then asking a straightforward question:

Do you believe that you have upheld that commitment?

Bondi answered quickly: yes, she believed she had. She repeated her pledge to end “weaponization” and insisted that the department under her leadership is applying the law equally.

But instead of laying out specific examples of how she has insulated herself from political interference, Bondi shifted to broad talking points about fairness and past abuses, echoing the same phrases she used during her confirmation and in television interviews.

For Klobuchar, that was the first warning sign. An attorney general confident in her independence, she suggested, should be able to walk through concrete safeguards, not just repeat slogans.

The President’s Public Pressure Campaign

Klobuchar then moved to what she framed as the heart of the problem: direct pressure from the president himself.

In recent months, the president has used public posts to call for criminal charges against several individuals he views as opponents, including former cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and even a sitting senator who serves on the Judiciary Committee.

One post, dated September 20, 2025, singled Bondi out by name, warning that “we can’t delay any longer” and claiming that not bringing charges was hurting the administration’s “reputation and credibility.” He then went on to list specific people he said should be prosecuted.

Klobuchar’s question was simple: did Bondi view that kind of public demand as a directive to the Justice Department?

Bondi did not answer directly. Instead, she praised the president as “the most transparent president in American history” and suggested there was nothing new in what he had said, noting he had expressed similar views for years.

The senator’s concern, however, was not about transparency. It was about whether those highly visible messages operate as instructions — and whether prosecutors, seeing those messages and the career consequences for crossing the White House, feel pressure to follow them.

Bondi declined to say.

The Siebert Firing and the Comey Indictment

Klobuchar’s next line of inquiry focused on the case of former FBI Director James Comey.

According to public reporting and Senate Democrats, Erik Siebert, the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, reviewed the evidence against Comey and concluded it was not sufficient to justify an indictment.Siebert, a conservative Republican, reportedly resisted pressure from senior administration officials to bring the case.

He was then pushed out of his role. After his departure, a new prosecutor was installed, and Comey was indicted on charges related to his congressional testimony, just before the statute of limitations expired.

Klobuchar asked Bondi directly:

Is it true that career prosecutors found the evidence insufficient?

What changed your view on Siebert and the case?

Why was he removed?

Bondi refused to discuss any “personnel decisions” or the internal deliberations around the case, repeating that line several times.

For Klobuchar, this was more than a staffing question. When an experienced U.S. attorney is removed after declining to bring charges that the president strongly wants, the personnel decision becomes a policy decision — and a potential message to every other prosecutor in the department.

A Veteran National Security Prosecutor Removed

The pattern, Klobuchar argued, didn’t stop with Siebert.

She highlighted the recent firing of Michael Benari, a respected national security prosecutor in the same office, who had served for roughly two decades and was working on cases related to service members killed in Afghanistan. His dismissal reportedly came after criticism from a partisan media figure, who suggested he was part of internal resistance to the Comey case, even though Benari had not worked on that case at all.

Klobuchar asked Bondi how removing a long-serving national security prosecutor in that way could possibly improve public safety.

Bondi again refused to answer, saying she would not discuss personnel matters. Instead, she pivoted to the ongoing government shutdown, noting that Justice Department employees were working without pay and blaming members of Klobuchar’s party for the funding impasse.

For viewers, the question and answer barely seemed connected. Klobuchar was asking about the message sent when an experienced prosecutor is dismissed after public criticism tied to a politically sensitive case. Bondi answered with a broader argument about budget politics and crime.

Independence, Oversight, and Unanswered Questions

Throughout the exchange, the core tension was clear. Klobuchar wanted to know whether the attorney general is:

resisting direct pressure to prosecute named political critics, and

protecting career prosecutors when they make evidence-based decisions that do not align with the president’s wishes.

Bondi, by contrast, stayed behind a wall of refusals to talk about individual decisions, investigations, or internal advice — even when the underlying events were already public and at the center of the hearing. That included questions about:

whether she had received any instruction or requests from the White House to launch, halt, or avoid specific investigations;

whether she had ever told the president “no” in response to such requests; and

whether high-profile public posts calling for prosecutions were treated as directives inside the department.

Each time, Bondi either declined to answer or redirected the conversation.

For Klobuchar, that pattern amounted to a failure of the commitment Bondi had made at her confirmation. An independent Justice Department, the senator argued, cannot be one where:

prosecutors are removed after resisting political pressure,

personnel changes follow partisan criticism, and

the attorney general will not say whether she is being urged to target specific individuals.

Beyond One Hearing: What’s at Stake

This hearing wasn’t just about one senator and one attorney general clashing in a high-profile moment. It touched on the foundations of how the Justice Department is supposed to work.

For decades, administrations of both parties have publicly described a “firewall” between the White House and federal prosecutors, especially in individual criminal cases. Presidents may set broad priorities — on issues like violent crime, national security, or civil rights — but they are not supposed to direct who gets charged.

That norm is not written in a single law; instead, it’s maintained through internal rules, traditions, and the willingness of attorneys general to say no, even at political cost.

The picture Klobuchar sketched in her questioning was very different: a Justice Department where:

public posts from the president function as loud signals about who should be the next target,

top prosecutors can lose their jobs after refusing to act on weak cases, and

the attorney general refuses to explain changes that align neatly with the president’s wishes.

Bondi and her allies strongly reject that characterization. They argue that she is simply correcting past political distortions, ensuring that no one is exempt from investigation, and refusing to discuss ongoing or sensitive matters for good-faith reasons.

But Klobuchar’s line of questioning underscored a basic truth: when the public cannot see clear limits on presidential influence, trust in the justice system erodes.

The Role of Public Understanding

Your transcript ends with a message that also works as a conclusion: oversight only matters if people watching from the outside understand what is being tested.

Hearings like this are not just exercises in partisan theater. They are one of the few moments when officials have to answer, on the record, whether they are following the rules that keep law enforcement fair and impartial.

When a senator asks whether the White House is steering prosecutions — and the attorney general will not answer — that silence raises as many questions as any headline.

And that’s the deeper issue Klobuchar was pointing to in this exchange: not just a disagreement about strategy or individual cases, but a mounting crisis of confidence in whether the nation’s most powerful law-enforcement agency is truly acting at arm’s length from politics, or whether those lines have already been quietly crossed.