It looks like progress is being made in getting more of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees through the confirmation process and into their roles of helping the president to overhaul the federal government.
So far, only six of Trump’s fifteen Cabinet-level nominees have been confirmed:
- Secretary of State: Marco Rubio
- Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth
- Secretary of Homeland Security: Kristi Noem
- Director of the Central Intelligence Agency: John Ratcliffe
- Secretary of the Treasury: Scott Bessent
- Secretary of Transportation: Sean Duffy
WATCH LIVE: RFK Jr. Confirmation Hearing Before Senate Finance Committee
Trump’s pick for Attorney General, Pam Bondi, made it one step closer to assuming command of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) after her nomination was approved Wednesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote of 14-10. Bondi’s nomination now goes for a vote by the full Senate, which is expected to take place in the coming weeks.
During her two-day confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bondi, who is the former attorney general of Florida, faced heated questioning from the panel’s Democrat members over such things as birthright citizenship, abortion, the 2020 election, and whether or not she would be able to be independent in her role as the nation’s top prosecutor. Democrats like Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), after watching the Biden DOJ be weaponized repeatedly against the administration’s political adversaries, were very concerned that the Trump DOJ would be weaponized with Bondi at the helm.
Bondi wasn’t bothered.
“Every case will be prosecuted based on the facts and the law that is applied in good faith — period. Politics have got to be taken out of the system,” she said.
RedState’s resident legal eagle Susie Moore summed up Bondi’s confirmation hearings like this:
While the Republicans on the committee generally used their time questioning Bondi to underscore the critical nature of the role and the need to remove politics from and deweaponize the Department of Justice, the Democrats did their level best to smear Bondi by proxy, pointing to comments made by President-elect Donald Trump and his nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel and demanding that she disavow them. When they weren’t taking that tack, they were circling back to the 2020 election, demanding that she unequivocally state that Joe Biden won it. (Bondi, for her part, repeatedly acknowledged that Joe Biden is the current president.)
While Bondi navigates the confirmation process on Capitol Hill, Acting Attorney General James McHenry got things kicked off at the Trump DOJ in a big way: he fired former special prosecutor Jack Smith’s entire staff.
On Monday, McHenry issued memos to at least a dozen Smith staffers informing them that their services were no longer needed at the DOJ. The subject line of the memo read “Notice of Removal from Federal Service,” and in it, the acting AG took the staffers to task for their blatant partisanship against Trump, which, he said, now rendered them useless to the federal government.
McHenry also launched an investigation into federal prosecutors who used US Code 1512(c) to bring charges against some J6 defendants, charges that were later dismissed by the United States Supreme Court. His actions are reportedly causing career DOJ employees to grab their smelling salts as the Trump tidal wave threatens their positions within the agency.
All eyes now turn to the full Senate for the final battle in Bondi’s nomination, where some maverick Democrats like Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman could break rank with the party to help Bondi get approved.
