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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, I stand here to amplify my support that I was able to give in the Judiciary Committee of Pam Bondi, who will hopefully, in a few short hours here, be confirmed as the next Attorney General of the United States of America.

I want to thank, before I do that, the leadership and the hard work of Leader Thune and Senate Majority Whip Barrasso in this entire confirmation process, working at a clip that I think is responsible and one that honors the mandate that President Trump got to shake things up here in Washington, DC.

I think what you saw in November was a dynamic where people weren't particularly happy with what was going on in this town. They voted for reform. President Trump is putting together a team of reformers. Look no further for an ideal place for that reform than the Department of Justice.

Before I get there, I do want to point out on a personal note that when President Trump announced that he was supporting Pam Bondi, I think I had said to somebody that this was a home run. Many of us in this Chamber are often outdone by Senator Graham. He described it as a ``grand slam touchdown, hole in one, ace, hat trick, slam dunk, Olympic gold medal pick.'' And he was right.

I have known Pam Bondi for years from the AG world. That was my job before I had this job. I was attorney general of Missouri. Pam was always known as a leader and somebody who has this really rare combination of a steel backbone and a heart of gold. She is in it for the right reasons. She cares about the rule of law.

She started her career from humble beginnings in a small town in Florida. She wanted to be a prosecutor. We heard it in her testimony in the Judiciary Committee, that that was her goal. It was to be a prosecutor. She spent hours and years in those courtrooms prosecuting the bad guys. She later became the attorney general of one of our bigger States.

As I mentioned, she was a leader. She defended the Constitution. She took on the opioid epidemic. She was relentless in taking on human trafficking and is somebody, I think, that everybody can look up to, not just from a personal perspective and her personal story but also in the way that she took on her job and had accolades from both sides of the aisle. There was actually somebody in the Senate committee, who was on the other side of the aisle in Florida, who ran for attorney general at the same time Pam Bondi was running for attorney general and testified to her character.

There is just no question that she is supremely qualified for this job, and we are really going to need somebody as the Attorney General to lead the Department of Justice who has that kind of integrity, who believes in the Constitution, and believes in individual rights and getting that Department back to where it always should have been, which is fighting crime.

Sadly, over the last 4 years, we have seen a Department of Justice gone astray--one that has made headlines, of course, for going after parents who showed up to school board meetings, under the auspices of the PATRIOT Act, treating moms and dads as terrorists who went to a school board open-forum meeting and had concerns about things like critical race theory or forced masking.

The full weight of the Federal Government honed in on parents and Catholics, who were treated the same way because they were traditional Catholics, literally setting up informant networks in an effort to spy on them because of their religious affiliation.

I am not talking about the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I am talking about the United States of America in 2021.

What Merrick Garland did to this Agency and the Department of Justice is a tragedy.

Kash Patel, hopefully, will move out of the Judiciary Committee here soon and be the next leader of the FBI and restore integrity to that Agency as well. But, of course, the Department of Justice that Pam Bondi, hopefully, in a few short hours, will be confirmed and then sworn in to lead, will restore integrity.

In addition to going after Catholics and in addition to going after families who showed up to school board meetings, the very coordinated effort of lawfare by the past administration to take out their chief political rival under the moniker of ``show me the man, and I will show you the crime'' can't be dismissed. They are not going to want to talk about that, but the effort to financially ruin President Trump, to literally throw him in jail for the rest of his life, deserves the scorn of the history books.

Joe Biden gave a speech in the fall of 2022 calling half of America a threat to democracy; that President Trump would never make it back to the Oval Office. And guess what happened: A series of zombie cases-- with, at best, novel legal theories--was resurrected.

In New York, the No. 3 person at DOJ left the Department of Justice to join the DA's office in New York. Why would that person want to do that? Well, guess what. President Trump was prosecuted in a Manhattan courtroom not long after that.

In State cases, the No. 2 person in the DA's office in Atlanta was coordinating with the White House Counsel's Office on the prosecution of President Trump in Georgia.

And then Jack Smith--Jack Smith--was brought in, who was notorious among legal circles for being overzealous with overprosecutions, overcharging--was brought in specifically to take out President Trump. And it was only the Supreme Court, ultimately, that prevented that.

But this was all a scheme devised by the Biden administration to make sure President Trump never got back into office. Well, guess what. He stared it all down, and he won. And we have a real opportunity now to have a level set.

I don't think it is right that we have people pursued because of their politics from a criminal perspective. Nothing was out of bounds in the last 4 years by the Biden administration and Merrick Garland.

So Pam Bondi is just the kind of person to come in to restore integrity, to make sure that our Department of Justice is fighting on behalf of the American people and not in an attempt, ironically, to undermine our Republic, the accusation--the very accusation--that was leveled at Joe Biden's political opponent.

With that, I look forward to voting yes on Pam Bondi and having a real leader, somebody we can look up to, to lead that very important Department of Justice.

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