http://www.advocate.com/politicians/2016/9/13/8-lowest-points-pam-bondis-sad-career
<snip>
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has been in the news lately for the fact that she decided not to investigate fraud allegations against the so-called Trump University in 2013 — funny, just days after Trump’s foundation made a big donation to her reelection campaign. LGBT folks remember her, of course, for her many efforts to keep marriage equality from coming to the Sunshine State. But Bondi has taken many other actions that are, if may we use the word, deplorable. Learn all about them on the next pages.
When Bondi first ran for attorney general, in 2010, she and her opponents in the Republican primary were vying to see who could be the most conservative. John Stemberger, president of the far-right Florida Family Policy Council, questioned whether Bondi supported the state’s ban on adoption by gays and lesbians — a law enacted in 1977, when Florida orange juice pitchwoman Anita Bryant’s antigay campaign was at its height. Bondi “refuses to take a position on the gay adoption ban,” Stemberger said in an email endorsing one of her rivals. Indeed, at a campaign appearance Bondi had mentioned that she was friends with a same-sex couple who had adopted a child from overseas, and she called, rather vaguely, for reform of the adoption process. But when PolitiFact contacted Bondi to check out Stemberger’s claim, she voiced support for the ban in no uncertain terms. “As Florida’s next attorney general, I will vigorously defend Florida’s law banning gay adoption in our state,” said Bondi, who had worked as a prosecuting attorney in Tampa. “As a veteran prosecutor who has spent her entire career upholding the laws of this state, I have the training and experience necessary to successfully defend our laws in a courtroom.” She didn’t get the chance, however. In September 2010, before the election, a state appeals court struck down the ban, and then-Gov. Charlie Crist announced the state would not pursue a further appeal. The ban remained on the books, though unenforceable, for five more years; in 2015, the state legislature finally passed a bill repealing it, and Gov. Rick Scott signed it into law.
In 2011, her first year in office, Bondi was accused of going too easy on mortgage lenders in her investigation of whether they had misled consumers who took out home loans and later found themselves in foreclosure as the nation’s housing bubble burst. “Her stance was that she didn’t feel the banks were as liable as the media portrayed them to be, and people shouldn’t have gone ahead and signed the mortgage paperwork, and that they knew what they were getting into,” Jerry Pena of the nonprofit consumer rights group Focus told the Orlando Sentinel in December of that year. Earlier in the year, two mortgage-fraud investigators had been forced to resign from the attorney general’s office, and another left “after releasing a scathing memo accusing the office’s management of political influence-peddling and noting that several top lawyers had recently left for jobs with foreclosure-related companies under investigation,” as the Sun Sentinel, another Florida newspaper, put it. Eventually the state reached settlement agreements with several lenders and shared in a federal settlement as well. But Florida was slow to spend its $300 million share of the federal settlement, as Bondi contended she should have sole authority to disburse the funds, with no role for the state legislature. She and lawmakers finally reached an agreement that the legislature would have control. And — credit where it’s due — she did get legislators to promise that most of the money would go to housing instead of other state programs.
-------------------
What a scumbag
= new reply since forum marked as read
