Animal abuse

Pam Bondi tried to steal a 4-year-old's dog

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary on MAGA's top rite of passage: animal abuse

By Drew Magary

This week in “What The Hell Is Wrong With These People?” I give you U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Here’s Pam Bondi sitting before Congress to defend the hire of a Jan. 6 rioter to her Department of Justice (her defense is that President Donald Trump had pardoned the man, so he couldn’t have done anything wrong, you see). Here’s Pam Bondi refusing to answer a question from California Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and instead staring down at her papers, as if it might render her invisible to everyone else in the room. Here’s Pam Bondi complaining, “This is so ridiculous,” when another Democratic congressmember asks her whether Trump and now-deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein ever partied with “underage girls.”

Oh, and here’s Pam Bondi refusing to acknowledge the other Epstein victims — victims whom her department had blown off entirely — sitting behind her in the chamber:

This is a gross person, but you’re used to me writing about gross people in this space. In the case of Pam Bondi, there’s an origin story to her grossness, chronicled by Stephanie McCrummen of the Atlantic, that qualifies as “somewhat interesting” compared to the backstories of her fellow MAGA dorks. McCrummen found that Bondi was once a normal Floridian, or as normal as anyone from Florida can be. But while serving as a prosecutor in her home state, Bondi became a TV personality on the side and gradually transformed into a sociopath as a result. This is what usually happens to people who become TV personalities, with Donald Trump being the foremost example. But there’s an early anecdote within McCummen’s piece that suggests Bondi was always vulnerable to such monsterism. Here is that story:

“Another dog she helped was a Saint Bernard named Master Tank. She adopted him from a shelter after he was lost during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, not long after her own Saint Bernard had died. The story has been told but bears repeating. Master Tank belonged to Steve and Dorreen Couture and their grandson, who was 4, recovering from the murder-suicide of his parents and losing his dog during the storm. Bondi said the dog was a ‘walking skeleton’ and ‘dying from heartworms’ when she adopted him. The Coutures eventually tracked down Master Tank, but instead of giving him back, Bondi hired a lawyer, who accused the Coutures of abusing the dog, which Bondi had renamed Noah. ‘She lied,’ Dorreen told a Palm Beach Post columnist years later. ‘My little grandson begged her to take the dog home, and she refused. She thought she would just wear us down. That we were unstable people and would just quit.’ The case was settled out of court, with Bondi securing visitation rights, but she never did visit. She got another dog.”

I myself am a crazy dog person, so allow me to connect a few pawprints here. Pam Bondi once served as a TV surrogate for Mitt Romney back during the 2012 election cycle. That’s the same Mitt Romney who once drove from Boston to Canada with his dog strapped to the roof of his family’s station wagon. And what’s this? Bondi is also tight with Homeland Security chief and cheatin’ heart Kristi Noem, who once shot her own dog and then dumped its body into a gravel pit because she “hated” the poor creature. So here we have a dog hoarder, a bad dog dad and a dog executioner … all politically aligned with a president who has never owned a dog and punctuates many of his choicest insults with “LIKE A DOG!”

Because while I am a crazy dog person, I’m one within defined cultural norms. My family rescued our dog from a shelter, but we wouldn’t have sued to keep Carter if it had turned out he belonged to a 4-year-old Katrina orphan. Sometimes Carter gets on my nerves, but not enough to make me want to take him outside and put a bullet in his dome. And whenever our family makes a long drive, we make sure to leave enough room inside the minivan so that we don’t have to lash Carter to the roof like he’s a goddamn Christmas tree. I love my dog to pieces. I love him so much that I just wanna hug him until his head pops off. But I do not hug him that hard, because that would be counterproductive. I know my limits.

Pam Bondi, and her colleagues, do not have such limits. That’s been clear to all Americans over the past year, if not much longer. But it’s their collective hostility to the animal kingdom that provides the starkest contrast between them and all of the good Americans. What kind of person would heavily redact the Epstein files while also doxxing many of the victims named within them? Probably a person who sees nothing wrong with stealing dogs from kids. What kind of person accuses Renee Nicole Good of being a “domestic terrorist” after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot her in the face? Probably a person who guns down her own dog in cold blood, and then murders one of her own goats on top of that, as a little treat. And what kind of weirdo tells the entire country that “corporations are people”? Probably a guy who takes his own pet for a death ride atop a Volvo.

I grew up in the 1980s, meaning I was raised to believe that the two greatest threats to my personal safety were child molesters and serial killers. I was warned about both factions so often that I figured my destiny was to be raped and killed by a stranger with candy before my 10th birthday. So imagine how befuddled I am that our country is now run by people who have ties to the most well-connected child molester in world history, and who treat animals the way that aspiring serial killers often have. I was warned about these people. Often. And now here they are. Maybe the cops should have kept tabs on these people for the past 40 years instead of tear gassing Black people instead.

Because now you and I know that the warning signs were always there. If I only knew Pam Bondi for her dognapping tendencies, I’d still find her an utterly repellent person who has no business running a candle store, much less an entire arm of the federal government. You would, too. No one would have to tell you and me about all of the other horrible things she’s done. We’d know it instinctively. Like a dog might.