Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) defended former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney General, this week after she promised to remove anti-Trump individuals from the department.

Lankford made the remarks during a Sunday interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Dana Bash when asked about whether Bondi would weaponize the department to go after Trump’s political opponents.

“[Trump] wants to make sure that the people that are around him in the Cabinet are at least directionally the right direction,” he said. “This has been a question, quite frankly, since the Kennedy administration, when President Kennedy put his brother in as attorney general.”

Bash then played a clip of remarks that Bondi made in the past on Fox News:

BONDI: The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated, because the deep state, last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight on them.

And they can all be investigated. And the house needs to be cleaned out.

Lankford said that he did not agree with the notion that Bondi’s comments were indicative of her pursuing “retribution” for Trump.

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“I think it’s trying to be able to get us back to neutral and to balance on that,” he said, adding that in the past, there were “individuals within the FBI, and that was very well — known after President Trump came on in 2016 — that there were members of the FBI that hated him that were in senior leadership that were working to be able to undercut him, Peter Strzok, multiple others that were actively working to try to undercut the president.”

“I think it’s entirely appropriate for Pam Bondi to step in and to say, or whoever that is as attorney general, to be able to step in and say, we’re not going to allow someone to try to undercut the President of the United States in this Department of Justice,” he continued. “You have got to actually be balanced and about justice, not about attacking the president.”

He said anyone trying to undercut the president at the department “should be gone” immediately.

“I don’t see any evidence of that kind of retribution.”@SenatorLankford downplays Trump’s threats of payback at DOJ but tells @DanaBashCNN “if someone is in the Department of Justice right now that is actively trying to undercut the president, they should be gone.” pic.twitter.com/6HbEwvSGv2

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 24, 2024