Pam Bondi, Donald Trump’s replacement pick for attorney general, has at least one thing going for her, CNN political commentator Ana Navarro said Thursday: She hasn’t been accused of sexual assault or statutory rape.
Navarro contrasted Bondi with several of Trump’s Cabinet selections, the first being former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz. Gaetz has been accused of having sex with a minor and for paying for sex. He denies both, and a federal investigation into the matter didn’t bring charges against him.
“I know Pam Bondi very well,” Navarro said on AC360. “Pam Bondi, like many other Republicans, is a mainstream Republican who turned MAGA.”
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“I will tell you, she is not an ogre. She is not a jerk. She is not a person who purposely wants to come across as being the kind of person that Matt Gaetz wants to come across as being,” she said.
“She has been an early loyalist of Donald Trump back in the 2016 primaries. She was a loyalist of him even though Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio were running. I think with Pam Bondi, he gets loyalty, which matters a lot to him.”
“And,” Navarro continued, “she hasn’t committed statutory rape or been accused of it.”
Navarro then alluded to former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who in 2017 was accused of sexual assault and who paid off the accuser for fear of losing his TV gig. Hegseth, potentially the next head of the Defense Department, denies the sexual assault allegation.
“She hasn’t been accused of sexual assault,” Navarro said.
Navarro then drew yet another comparison, this time to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services.
“She hasn’t sawed the head off a whale or stabbed a dead bear cub. So, all in all, I’d say she’s one of the better picks.”
Kennedy has admitted to improperly dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park in 2014. And, his daughter says he once decapitated a dead whale in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, tied it to the roof of his minivan, and drove it five hours back home to New York.
