Attorney General Pam Bondi is out, and the position she vacated carries a history of dramatic exits stretching back more than a century. Her departure last week adds another chapter to a pattern that has touched nearly every consequential presidency of the modern era.
The nation's top law enforcement officer has always occupied uniquely volatile ground. The attorney general serves the president but swears an oath to the Constitution, and when those loyalties collide, the fallout tends to be spectacular.
As Fox News reported, the most famous AG departure remains the "Saturday Night Massacre" of October 20, 1973. Nixon ordered Attorney General Eliot Richardson to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox shortly after Cox subpoenaed the Oval Office recordings. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then turned to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who also resigned rather than carry out the order.
The task finally fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork, better known for his later unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination under Reagan. Bork fired Cox and reportedly considered resigning himself, but stayed on at the urging of his predecessors to ensure stability at the DOJ. That November, a federal judge found Cox's firing unlawful. Nixon resigned less than a year later.
Richardson's predecessor, Richard Kleindienst, had already departed amid Watergate. He was playing golf at Burning Tree in Bethesda when G. Gordon Liddy reportedly approached him to reveal that the Committee to Re-elect the President was involved in the burglary. Kleindienst told the G-man to get lost. But the scandal consumed him anyway, and Nixon accepted his resignation on April 30, 1973.
Alberto Gonzales, one of George W. Bush's closest advisers dating back to Austin, resigned in 2007 under bipartisan fire over the DOJ's firing of several U.S. attorneys. The controversy centered on whether politics drove the firings, and Gonzales did himself no favors during Senate testimony.
He stated "I do not recall" or similar framings dozens of times during a contentious hearing. Chuck Schumer, then a senator from New York, unloaded on him:
"You've answered 'I don't know' or 'I can't recall' to close to a hundred questions. You're not familiar with much of the workings of your own department. And we still don't have convincing explanations of the who, when and why, in regard to the firing of the majority of the eight U.S. attorneys."
Gonzales maintained that no U.S. attorney was removed "to interfere with or influence a particular prosecution for partisan political gain." Bush stood behind him, rebuking a "no confidence" resolution, but the pressure proved too great. Gonzales stepped down that August.
Bush called it a shame that "a talented and honorable person" had his "good name dragged through the mud for political reasons." Washington has a way of making that a recurring theme.
Jeff Sessions was the first U.S. senator to endorse Donald Trump in 2016. That loyalty earned him the attorney general post, but not immunity from the president's frustration.
Sessions recused himself from the Trump-Russia investigation, citing his own campaigning for Trump and reports of meetings with Russian envoy Sergey Kislyak. The recusal opened the door for Robert Mueller's appointment as special counsel, and Trump never forgave it. He also faulted Sessions for declining to criminally pursue Hillary Clinton.
Sessions' tenure ended the day after Republicans lost the House in the 2018 midterms. His professional record told a different story than the headlines: he reversed Obama-era policies and cracked down on sanctuary cities. But Democrats predictably treated his firing as a constitutional emergency. Cory Booker called it "an alarming development that brings us one step closer to a constitutional crisis," claiming Trump fired Sessions out of fear that Mueller would implicate him. The Mueller investigation, of course, ultimately produced no charges against the president.
William Barr's second stint as attorney general ended in December 2020 after he told the Associated Press he had not seen "fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election." The comment put him at odds with the president at the most contentious moment of Trump's first term.
In his resignation letter, Barr applauded Trump's ability to "weather" the Russia investigation and Democrats' attempts to "cripple if not oust" the administration. He credited Trump with restoring the military and curbing illegal immigration. The departure was cordial on paper, if tense beneath the surface.
The first modern AG ouster belongs to Harry Daugherty, a member of Warren Harding's "Ohio Gang." His fall traced to the Teapot Dome scandal, which sent Interior Secretary Albert Fall to prison for accepting bribes related to no-bid oil leases in Wyoming.
Daugherty was investigated for failing to prosecute those involved, charged with conspiracy in the sale of illegal liquor permits during Prohibition, and accused of influence peddling. His brother Mal ran a bank that recorded "heavy withdrawals" during the Senate investigation and was eventually shuttered by the state of Ohio.
After Harding died in office in August 1923, Calvin Coolidge booted Daugherty from the DOJ over loss of public trust and his refusal to turn over departmental records. Daugherty was never convicted.
Every one of these departures followed the same basic script: a president's agenda collided with the institutional gravity of the Justice Department, and someone had to go. The details change. The dynamic doesn't.
What separates responsible governance from scandal is whether the attorney general serves the law or merely serves the political moment. Democrats have spent decades weaponizing every AG departure as proof of authoritarian overreach when a Republican sits in the Oval Office. They treated Sessions' firing like a five-alarm constitutional fire. They treated Eric Holder's contempt of Congress as a partisan inconvenience.
Bondi's exit will generate the same performative outrage. The left will cast it as unprecedented. It is anything but. Presidents have been firing, losing, and parting ways with their attorneys general since the Harding administration. The office demands independence, and independence inevitably creates friction with the person who made the appointment.
The question now is who comes next, and whether that person can navigate the tension that has claimed so many predecessors. History suggests the job chews people up. It also suggests the republic survives.