Transcription
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Hi everybody. I'm Britney Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is my Forbes colleague, money and politics reporter, Kyle Con Mullins. Kyle, thanks so much for coming back on.
Always great to be here, Britney.
Thanks for having me. I always love our conversations because they always end up in the intersection of money and politics, and this conversation really is no different. Today we're going to be talking about Pam Bondi, uh President Donald Trump's new attorney general. So first, to start off the conversation, I want to talk about just who is Pam Bondi? What was her career like before becoming the nation's top attorney?
Amondi, uh, fourth-generation Floridian, uh, daughter of two educators in Florida from Tampa Bay—my hometown, by the way. She's from Tampa; I'm from St. Petersburg, just across the water. Um, so she's a she's a hometown name for me. I grew up reading about Pam Bondi in the papers, uh, in the Tampa Bay Times when she was my attorney general and I was in, you know, like high school. Um, but yeah, she was born to, like I said, two educators. Um, her dad was actually a very pretty high-profile professor at the University of South Florida, um, who was very instrumental in the uh Middle School movement, which I didn't even know the thing that existed, but basically, um, established the creation of middle schools as opposed to junior highs as the primary education model in the United States. So he's actually a very well-known educator. Uh, her mother was an elementary school teacher for much of her career. Um, she went to college and got her law degree all in the state of Florida, and then after that, Pam Bondi became a prosecutor in Hillsboro County, Florida—that's where Tampa is—um, and she was in the prosecutor's office, a state prosecutor for 18 years. And so then that leads her to becoming Florida's attorney general. I want to know more about her tenure as attorney general in the Sunshine State, so maybe we can get a better understanding of what she's going to be like as the nation's attorney general. What was her salary, and what was her legacy in that position?
So $29,000 as Florida's attorney general, she uh was sworn in for eight years, and her salary did not change during that time. Salaries did flatten. Um, she was elected in 2010, uh, in that part of that big Tea Party wave that happened that year. She was a conservative attorney general; she was swept into office on this Tea Party wave, um, and she really ran in part on a platform of trying to run against uh the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare—President Obama's signature healthcare law. Um, it was passed uh just before the Tea Party wave, and the Tea Party wave is kind of a backlash to the law. Um, and so she actually led a lawsuit, a coalition by a bunch of Republican-led states trying to uh invalidate that law on constitutional grounds. She was struck down—that that that struck down by the Supreme Court in a pretty shocking 5-4 decision where John Roberts upheld the uh sided with the Liberals on the court to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. She didn't give up. Um, she tried again after President Trump was in office, um, suing again uh to try to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but the Supreme Court slapped that slop down too. Um, but besides that, um, she, you know, won two terms as attorney general, um, and ran a pretty standard, somewhat conservative, uh, you know, legal operation while she was attorney general. Um, crack down on the illegal drug trade in Florida. Um, she focused on prosecuting fraudsters uh and and drug traffickers uh and human traffickers. Uh, she also was a part of several big settlements that brought a lot of money to Florida, um, that includes a $3 billion settlement from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, um, that really affected the Floridian economy uh and Florida's tourism, um, and an $8 billion settlement from a national mortgage settlement in the wake of the Great Recession.
So I love talking politics, but also we're Forbes, so we love talking money. So let's get into the numbers here. She leaves office in 2019. How much was she worth then, and then fast forward six years later, today in 2025, how much is she worth now?
Yeah, we have a pretty good sense of what she was worth when she left office. Florida's disclosures—financial disclosures for politicians—are some of the best of the nation, um, in terms of their level of transparency and detail. So we know she was worth a little over $1.5 million when she left office. Almost all of that was her home in Tampa, which she had bought uh back in the late 1990s, and that had appreciated enormously in value since then. Um, and then she also had um over almost $600,000 uh in personal effects and household goods, which is pretty high for someone of this level of net worth. Um, we were a little bit surprised to see that she didn't really have any savings. It appeared she had um a checking account with $4,000 in it, and that appeared to be the extent of her liquid assets. Um, fast forward to today. We look at her financial disclosure today, and we are estimating she's worth at least $5 million and probably more, though there's some uncertainty that we're going to get into. So that's a pretty big jump in just six years. So she's added multi-millions to her fortune. And I think in the past six years, her time could be divided in a few buckets. So I do want to talk about the first bucket being her time as a lobbyist. What exactly was she doing here, and how much was she making?
Yeah, Pam Bondi left office in early 2019 and walked straight into that revolving door between the private sector and the public sector. She became a lobbyist for Ballard Partners. It's a Florida-based uh lobbying firm, um, but it's it's a global lobbying firm with clients all over the world. Um, her clients over the last six years uh while she was working at Ballard include uh, you know, General Motors, Carnival, Amazon, Uber—very big names you might know. Uh, also the nation of Qatar at one point hired her to be uh their um uh lobbyist in for the Trump Administration. And uh, it seems like, you know, the assumption here at least is that these companies were hiring her because she was a well-known conservative at this point. She was a prominent Trump defender; she had ties to the administration; Trump was president at the time. So so they were hoping maybe they could leverage some of those connections to get what they're looking for out of the government, right? Um, she also separately from that did a little bit of lobbying for Pfizer through a separate law firm. And so put that all together, um, we—her disclosures that we have only uh look at 2023 and 2024, but we know she made over $1.2 million from lobbying in those years—pretty lucrative gig there.
Now I want to talk more about her ties to the Trump Administration. She was involved in work in the Trump's orbit. Talk to us about what exactly she was doing there as well as the price tag associated with that work.
Totally. So I think there's like two elements here. Um, the first one is a little bit smaller. It's she did a lot of legal work for the America First Policy Institute. It was a uh MAGA think tank started and run by Linda McMahon and Brook Rollins. You might recognize those names: Linda McMahon, now the Secretary of Education, and Brook Rollins, now the Secretary of Agriculture. Um, so Pam Bondi joined up as their basically their head of litigation, and she and their team uh filed a number of legal actions—lawsuits and amicus briefs, those kinds of things—basically uh trying to support various MAGA causes. A lot of it was supporting President Trump, or now at that point former President Trump, uh in his various criminal and civil cases that he was battling at the time. Um, but they also filed stuff related to free speech and stuff related to vaccine mandates and really trying to push um sort of the MAGA on those items. Um, and she made somewhere around a couple hundred thousand dollars over 2023 and 2024—definitely nothing to sneeze at. The other thing that was much larger though was she did a bunch of consulting in connection with uh Trump Media and Technology Group's uh SPAC merger—that's how they went public and and and started trading publicly uh on the NASDAQ. Um, Trump Media and Technology Group is uh Truth Social's parent company, um, that's Donald Trump's uh, you know, basically personal media empire at this point. It's a very big chunk of his network. When that company went public, uh, it immediately was worth billions despite the fact that it only has a couple million dollars in revenue annually. Um, she was paid—she declares $2.9 million uh of um compensation from that consulting on her disclosure. However, uh, we are estimating that the the it was it was all in stocks or warrants, and we're estimating that those are worth closer to $1.9 million today.
I want to talk about this third bucket, which is marriage. You and I have talked about this before. She's not the first Trump cabinet official to benefit financially from a marriage. We talked about that with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Her net worth skyrocketed in part because of her latest marriage. So talk to us about that.
Yeah, so she recently married a guy named John Wakefield. Um, he's a former uh wealth manager, former corporate banker, and now he owns a real estate—co-owns a real estate private equity company. Um, they own a couple of properties uh that they recently purchased in uh Florida and in South Carolina. Um, those—there's two apartment complexes and there's one uh shopping plaza that they own. It's just commercial real estate investments. Um, and what's a bit odd is those assets—we can see how much they were purchased for in 2023 and 2024; they all—three of them—were purchased over the last couple of years, and two of them were between six and seven million, and then one was something like $28 million. Um, but his personal shares on the disclosure are much smaller than that, and so we're not 100% sure why. We don't know—maybe he he only owns a small actual stake in those properties himself; maybe his co-partner in the private equity firm owns more. We're still not sure exactly how that works. Um, and so because of that, this is where a lot of the uncertainty comes from. It's actually not clear how big John Wakefield's fortune is uh and how much that is contributing to Pam Bondi's. We know he's got money; we know he's he's got investments and he's got this lucrative private equity firm, but we don't know exactly how much it's worth, and we're still working on on digging into that.
So as you noted, in the past six years she went from the public sector, went to that revolving door in the private sector, made a couple million, now is back in the public sector, back as attorney general. How much will she be making in this position?
Her salary is $235,100, which sounds pretty good to me, but is a lot less than she's been making as a lobbyist the past couple of years.
As we know, President Trump, especially for his second term, ran on a platform that he touted as restoring law and order. How is Pam Bondi doing that as she serves as attorney general?
So she's already taken a bunch of actions as attorney general. Um, a couple of things I'll highlight, um, some big headline-grabbing things include releasing a bunch of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, related to the JFK assassination that the US government has been sitting on for a while, keeping in classified vaults. She's released those. Um, but some of the stuff she's done on the law and order thing, like you mentioned, um, she's brought actions against several blue states uh regarding immigration enforcement, trying to force them to cooperate more with the federal government on uh enforcement of uh immigration law in the United States. And then she has also um really taken a hard line on what President Trump calls the weaponization of the Justice Department. He alleges that under Joe Biden and and even under previous presidencies, um, the DOJ was out to get him personally and out to get conservatives and MAGA folks in general. Um, and so Pam Bondi has announced a number of investigations into some of the lawyers that previously were on the investigations into President Trump, including the criminal investigations into President Trump, um, and has also announced a number of initiatives trying to weed out uh potential um uh people who were often times career Justice Department officials um who were involved in those investigations. Um, and so critics have said that this is them trying to stack the Justice Department with their own cronies. Uh, you know, she's obviously not assenting to that point of view on it, but that's the um that that that's the that's how she's coming into the Justice Department. She's been in the job what—a little over a month now, I think. Um, so we we we we'll see how things go.
Kyle, as usual, I appreciate all your reporting. Thanks for coming on.
Always great to be here, Whitney. Thanks for having me.