Pam Bondi is celebrating a win for President Donald Trump’s massive ballroom after suffering a string of heavy blows in court.
The attorney general, 60, touted the Justice Department’s win against a preservationist group that sued to halt what it described as the “unlawful” construction of the 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom until it undergoes the legally mandated review processes.
Federal judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, denied the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s bid to pause the construction but said he would consider arguments next year about possibly issuing a longer-term preliminary injunction, according to Politico.
Bondi took a victory lap on X just hours after a Vanity Fair interview saw Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles criticize her for her handling of the Epstein files.
“Today @TheJusticeDept attorneys defeated an attempt to stop President Trump’s totally lawful East Wing Modernization and State Ballroom Project,” she wrote. “President Trump has faced countless bad-faith left-wing legal attacks — this was no different. We will continue defending the President’s project in court in the coming weeks.”
Leon, however, said he expects the Trump administration to fulfill its promise to submit the ballroom to the National Capital Planning Commission by the end of the year.
“The court will hold them to that,” he said at a federal court hearing in Washington. “They’ve got until the end of this month.”
Trump, 79, talked up his “approximately $400 million” project as he delivered remarks for a Hanukkah reception at the White House on Tuesday night.
“Who else but in our country would sue to stop a $400 million beautiful ballroom that people have been after for the White House?” he said. “It’ll be the most beautiful ballroom, and it’ll handle inaugurations. It’s got five-inch-thick glass windows. Impenetrable by anything but a howitzer.”
The development marks a small victory in what has been a rough patch for Bondi.
Earlier Tuesday, Wiles blasted the attorney general’s response over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files saga in an interview with Vanity Fair.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles told Vanity Fair. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
In another blow, last week, former Trump lawyer turned federal prosecutor Alina Habba, 41, was forced to step down from her role as acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey after a federal appellate court upheld her disqualification.
The Third Circuit—composed of George W. Bush and Barack Obama appointees—found that Habba’s appointment violated the rules for temporarily filling vacancies. Bondi has thrown her a bone by naming her a senior adviser.
“The court ruling has made it untenable for her to effectively run her office with politicized judges, pausing trials designed to bring violent criminals to justice,” Bondi wrote at the time. “These judges should not be able to countermand the president‘s choice of attorneys entrusted with carrying out the executive branch’s core responsibility of prosecuting crime.”
In November, a federal judge dismissed score-settling indictments against Trump foes James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, after finding that the U.S. attorney on those cases—Lindsey Halligan—was appointed illegally. Trump had installed former beauty queen Halligan, 36, as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia despite her lack of prosecutorial experience.
The dismissal sent Bondi into a meltdown against federal judges waging an “unconscionable campaign of bias and hostility” against Halligan.
“Lindsey and our attorneys are simply doing their jobs: advocating for the Department of Justice’s positions while following guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel,” she said. “They do not deserve to have their reputations questioned in court for ethically advocating on behalf of their client. This Department of Justice has no tolerance for undemocratic judicial activism.”
