On the morning of Nov. 4, 2020, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi drove northeast from Washington to Philadelphia on an urgent mission:to monitor the tally of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots as President Donald Trump’s reelection hung in the balance.
Bondi and another Trump loyalist, Corey Lewandowski, quickly discovered that pandemic protocols were preventing Republican observers from closely scrutinizing ballotsTrump had claimed were susceptible to fraud. So they called one of the president’s most high-profile hired guns — former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“I said, ‘Gee Pam … I don’t have the time,’” Giuliani recalled to a D.C. Bar committee that later ruled that his election challenge in Pennsylvania was grounds for disbarment. “I really didn’t want to go because I had so many things to organize, and it seemed to me that just one jurisdiction wasn’t worth sacrificing getting started in the others.”
Giuliani was swayed to join Bondi, Lewandowski andTrump’s younger son, Eric Trump, later that day at a news conference outside the Philadelphia airport, where Bondi declared: “We won Pennsylvania, and we want every vote to be counted in a fair way.”
That appearance marked the beginning of Bondi’ssupport forTrump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election — a role often overlooked among the better-known players in the post-election drama but one documented in media reports, court filings, evidence obtained by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, and testimony by Lewandowski and Giulianiduring his D.C. disbarment proceeding.
Giuliani faced intense media scrutiny and professional sanctions for making claims in court about the Pennsylvania vote that a D.C. Bar committee deemed “utterly false.” But in public appearances in the week after the election, Bondi also made unfounded allegations about“evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots,”and in private huddles with other campaign advisers she discussed legal strategies to challenge the results in a stateJoe Biden ultimately won by 80,000 votes….