I[excerptI]t was around this time that Bondi’s old friends began speaking of her as someone they could no longer recognize.

“She was loved around here, just so sweet,” the courthouse colleague said. “People who knew the old Pam, we just can’t resolve it.”

“I thought, Do I really know this person? ” the close friend remembered thinking after Bondi endorsed Trump.

The person they thought they knew was venturing ever deeper into Trump’s world. Though Bondi did not get a position in his first administration, in a way, she got something better. When she finished her second term as Florida attorney general, she joined a lobbying firm called Ballard Partners, which was co-led at the time by Trump’s 2016 Florida campaign manager, Susie Wiles, who would go on to run his 2024 campaign and is now his chief of staff.

She remained inside Trump world, which meant making at least $1 million at Ballard and nearly $3 million from shares in the Trump Media & Technology Group for consulting on the merger that created the company, according to financial disclosures covering the two years prior to her nomination as attorney general.

She would make another $520,000 in consulting fees from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, the disclosures show, where her work in the run-up to the 2024 election forecast the kind of attorney general she was willing to be. Bondi signed on to a brief supporting absolute presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for Trump when he was being investigated for 2020-election interference. In public letters and press releases, she backed a Georgia election-board official who’d claimed authority to unilaterally delay or deny the certification of election results.