CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig claimed Friday on CNN’s “The Lead” that Attorney General Pam Bondi “failed miserably” at exercising independence by announcing the Signal chat among senior national security officials did not include classified information.
Guest host Phil Mattingly said, “Elie, you wrote in New York Magazine on Wednesday predicting, ‘It’s certain that Bondi and everyone else in DoJ leadership knows what happened. Yet I feel confident predicting that the Justice Department won’t lift a finger to investigate this mess.’ One day later, the attorney general was asked if the Justice Department would get involved. Here’s what she said.”
At a press conference on Thursday, Bondi said, “First, it was sensitive information, not classified and inadvertently released and what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission.”
Honig said, “Here we have a very high stakes, complicated set of facts. 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. With zero facts, zero investigation, she says that there’s no classified information. Highly dubious.”
He added, “I have to say, when Pam Bondi was nominated, I came on air and said she’s absolutely qualified on paper to be the attorney general. But the test is going to be can she exercise independence? And right here she has failed miserably. That statement was something much more like you’d hear from a White House press secretary than the nation’s top law enforcement officer.”
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