President-elect Donald Trump last week announced the nomination of Florida’s former attorney general, Pam Bondi, to head up the Justice Department, touching off a flurry of speculation as to how Bondi, a longtime prosecutor and close ally of Trump, might lead the department.

Former colleagues who knew her best during her time as a Florida prosecutor, including a Democrat opponent for state attorney general who she later tapped to be her drug czar, described Bondi in a series of interviews as an experienced litigator whose leadership style is more consensus-builder than bridge-burner and whose tenure may generate less friction among rank-and-file career staff at the Justice Department than early critics might fear. 

If confirmed, those close to Bondi told Fox News Digital that she will likely espouse many of the same priorities she did in her years as a prosecutor in Florida, primarily in cracking down on drug trafficking, illicit fentanyl imports and in running a Justice Department that enforces fair treatment of both political and career appointees alike.

‘From a lawyer’s standpoint, this woman knows how to be a lawyer and a trial lawyer,’ Nicholas Cox, Florida’s statewide prosecutor, told Fox News Digital of Bondi’s record. ‘There’s just not a question about it.’ 

Here are some of the ways her time in Florida could inform her tenure as attorney general. 

In Florida, Bondi quickly earned a reputation for cracking down on opioids and the many ‘pill mills’ operating in the Sunshine State when she was elected as the state’s attorney general in 2010. At the time, Florida ‘was the epicenter of the opioid crisis,’ Florida statewide prosecutor Nicholas Cox said in an interview.

It was also a hub for so-called drug tourism: Out-of-state residents traveled to Florida from across the country to purchase opioids in bulk, relying on the state’s many-house pharmacies, ‘cash-only’ clinics and a lack of statewide prescribing laws to purchase the addictive medications, largely without restriction.

When Bondi took office, opioids were killing around seven people each day, Dave Aronberg, the state attorney for Palm Beach County, who formerly served as Bondi’s drug czar, said in an interview. 

There were also ‘more pain clinics than McDonald’s locations’ in Florida at the time, he said, illustrating the magnitude of the problem. 

Aronberg, a Democrat who ran against Bondi for attorney general in 2010 before she appointed him to the post, credits his former boss as being the person ‘most responsible for ridding the state of Florida of destructive pill mills.’

He and others point to Bondi’s push for legislation that helped eliminate pill mills in the state, her crackdown on doctors and clinics responsible for prescribing the pain pills en masse, and her work in enforcing Florida’s ‘Statewide Prescription Drug Diversion and Abuse Road Map’ to best coordinate federal, state and local efforts as helping end the crisis. 

Later, she served in Trump’s first presidential term as a member of his Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission.

If confirmed as U.S. attorney general, Bondi has made clear she plans to remain focused on cracking down on illicit drugs—albeit on a national scale.

Bondi’s former colleagues told Fox News Digital they expect she will bring the same playbook to Washington—this time with an eye to cracking down on drug trafficking, illicit fentanyl use, and the cartels responsible for smuggling the drugs across the border. 

Bondi has spent years as a prosecutor in Florida, first as a prosecutor in the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office before being elected in 2010 as the state’s attorney general. 

Cox, the Florida state prosecutor, noted that Bondi’s career was also heavily shaped by her 18 years working in the Florida District Attorney’s Office, a career position that was not informed by politics. 

There, the main focus was ‘cooperation’— a mentality that Cox said extended to ‘prosecutors, law enforcement, and public defenders, for that matter.’  ‘We all worked together and it made for a really strong criminal justice system,’ Cox said.

 ‘We all worked together, and it made for a really strong criminal justice system,’ Cox said.

Aronberg echoed this assessment. The state attorney for Palm Beach county had formerly served as a Democrat in the state senate before running for attorney general. He later dropped out endorsed her Democratic opponent. 

But afrer her election, Bondi tapped him to be her drug czar— an unorthodox move that Aronberg and others said demonstrates Bondi’s commitment to solving problems and working across the aisle on top priorities. 

‘It really said a lot about her because she got a lot of criticism, withering criticism, from some members of her own party’ who were upset she would choose a Democrat for the role, Aronberg said. 

In Florida, Bondi ‘was not seen as a very partisan person,’ he added, citing her ‘strong working relationship with Democrats,’ which continued even after being sworn in as state attorney general. 

‘She would support legislation regardless of whether it was supported by Democrats or Republicans,’ Aronberg said, and in return, she was well-liked across the aisle. 

In announcing Bondi as his nomination for attorney general, Trump again took aim at the Justice Department, which he characterized as being ‘weaponized’ against him.

‘Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again,’ Trump said in the statement.

But those close to Bondi said they do not think of her as an overly political person, saying they believe the many years she spent as a litigator and state attorney general will help her deftly navigate the unique political pressures in the role, including Trump’s calls to go after his so-called ‘enemies’ within the Department of Justice.

Though Bondi herself has echoed calls to ‘investigate the investigators’ involved in the special counsel investigations into Donald Trump, former colleagues said they think she has learned from former Justice Department leaders before her, including former Attorney General Bill Barr and former Special Counsel John Durham, who was tapped by Barr to investigate alleged misconduct in the Trump-Russia probe. 

‘I’ve told my Democratic friends not to overreact because we have been through this before,’ Aronberg said, citing the special counsel probe led by Durham.

In the next four years, he said, ‘I think we will see more of that.’

But Aronberg sees a difference between Bondi and others, including Trump’s former attorney general nominee, Matt Gaetz. 

Bondi ‘is not going to burn the house down,’ Aronberg said. ‘She’s not going to manufacture evidence as a way to walk Trump’s enemies out in handcuffs.’

We tend to associate Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims in 1621. Shiny square buckles on boxy black shoes and a feast with the Indians, but in fact, this cherished national holiday actually began centuries later, in the midst of the greatest conflict to ever engulf the United States of America. 

In early October of 1863, fresh off of a costly, but eventually decisive, victory in the Civil War’s  battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln decreed that he would ‘set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving,’ the randomness of which, in fairness, does sound a bit like Nate Bargatze’s Geroge Washington on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ 

But remarkably, even as the cannons were still hot, even in the face of another two years of brutal destruction and loss, Lincoln was already thinking about how the country could once again be united. 

In his proclamation he does, ‘fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.’ 

Peace, harmony, tranquility and union. How lacking have these been in our society for the past decade? And while we have not fought with screaming hot lead, we have, with our words, and our actions, made strangers of each other. 

There are leading TV personalities such as MSNBC’s Joy Reid all but urging her viewers to cut off family and friends who voted for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the right too often accuses those on the left of having a woke mind virus, of not just being wrong, but somehow fundamentally broken. 

But if Lincoln, despite the depravities committed by both sides in the Civil War, could envision a future in which the men of the blue and the gray could sit and dine together peaceably, then surely, we can.  

Maybe it is fitting that this holiday, born of fraternal conflict, serves as the symbolic front lines, so to speak, of our political battles. We have built the cliché of the MAGA-loving uncle and the wine mom cousin screaming at each other about immigration over frustrated grandma’s stuffing. 

And it is precisely because Americans so cherish Thanksgiving that we use it in this rhetorical way, as an avatar, as if to say, ‘things are so bad that it’s even ruining Thanksgiving.’ 

In my travels throughout the election, I asked many people I met if they had relationships with family or friends that had been strained by politics. Many, if not most, said yes to varying degrees. 

‘Sometimes I just have to block people on Facebook,’ some of them told me. One woman, a Republican, said, ‘I try to avoid politics, but it’s not just politics, it’s who we are.’ Meanwhile, I have had Democrats insist that the supposed dangers of Trump are a moral, not a political issue. 

Well, I’ve got some news, and a little perspective. No matter how much one hates President-elect Donald Trump or the woke left, it is nothing compared to searing hatred felt for Lincoln south of the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War and the years that followed. 

And yet today, it is Lincoln who stands alone in the pantheon of American greatness, unblemished by slavery or the petty foibles of the founders, and so it is right and just that he gave us Thanksgiving, our truly American national holiday. 

There are signs, after the raw-and-punishing election of the past year, that many Americans are ready to move on from animosity, to mend fences, and to get back to treating our fellow man as human beings, not members of a political movement. 

Thanksgiving is an excellent time to begin such a journey back to peace, harmony, tranquility and union.  

If all of us made one call, sent one text, or sat down, full before the fire with one family member we disagree with, that could be a massive step to restoring the comity and good faith we have lost.  

And it is precisely because Americans so cherish Thanksgiving that we use it in this rhetorical way, as an avatar, as if to say, ‘things are so bad that it’s even ruining Thanksgiving.’ 

Lincoln opened this door for us 161 years ago, and ever since, without him getting much credit, this holiday, above others, has stood fast in our hearts.  

This year, let us allow it to be more, let it be an end to all the recent anger and agony, and the beginning of a new and generous phase of American political life.  

Abraham Lincoln, who sacrificed all for us, would have it no other way. 

China is releasing three Americans Wednesday who the White House says were ‘wrongfully detained,’ Fox News has confirmed.

‘We are pleased to announce the release of Mark Swidan, Kai Li, and John Leung from detention in the People’s Republic of China,’ a National Security Council spokesperson said. ‘Soon they will return and be reunited with their families for the first time in many years. Thanks to this Administration’s efforts and diplomacy with the PRC, all of the wrongfully detained Americans in the PRC are home.’

Mark Swidan of Texas was 38-years old when he went to China on business looking for flooring for construction work in November 2012. He was arrested after his driver and translator were allegedly found with drugs, the Texas Tribune has reported. 

A United Nations report determined that Swidan was not in possession of drugs on his person or in his hotel room, and records show he was not in China at the time of the alleged offense. 

The U.N. report said that the 11 other people arrested with Swidan as part of the alleged trafficking ring were unable to identify him and that the conviction was based on his visiting a factory that had once been used to manufacture methamphetamine. 

His mother Katherine Swidan told Fox News last year that she wanted President Biden to demand Mark’s release.

‘I want him to say his name. I want him to be strong and make some demands. Diplomacy is important, I understand that, but this has been going on too long,’ Katherine Swidan said at the time. ‘He is not well at all. He’s lost 100 pounds.’

Harrison Li, the son of Kai Li, told Fox News around a year ago that his father was detained in China while traveling there for a memorial service for his own mother.

‘He was not allowed to get off the plane. As soon as he landed at Shanghai Pudong Airport, agents from the Ministry of State Security whisked him away and nobody has been able to see him outside of the prison ever since,’ Li said.

A website set up to raise awareness for Li said he had been held in China ‘since September 2016 on politically motivated charges of espionage and stealing state secrets. 

‘He is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence at Shanghai’s Qingpu Prison,’ it added.

Leung, who has permanent residency in Hong Kong, was also sentenced on espionage charges in 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal.

He was first detained in April 2021. A friend of Leung told the newspaper that he was involved in charity work supporting low-income elderly people and students in Jiangsu province and has organized tours between the U.S. and China for musicians.  

Fox News’ Kate Sprague, Andrew Mark Miller and Kristine Parks contributed to this report. 

A top aide to Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign recently revealed that internal polls never actually saw her defeating President-elect Donald Trump, but apparently this was not conveyed to those collecting high-dollar donations for her bid. 

‘That’s not what we were told,’ DNC National Finance Committee member and Harris campaign fundraiser Lindy Li shared with Fox News Digital. 

‘We were told definitely that she had a shot at winning – it wasn’t even a shot. I was even told that Pennsylvania was looking good, that we would win 3-4 swing states.’

‘And on the night of election night… we were told that we were going to win Iowa.’

But Harris senior adviser David Plouffe presented a much different analysis of the vice president’s chances at that point in time on ‘Pod Save America,’ a show hosted by staffers of former President Barack Obama.  

‘We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,’ he told the hosts in the episode which aired on Tuesday. 

‘I think it surprised people because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.’

Plouffe, along with other top Harris aides Jen O’Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter and Quentin Fulks, joined the podcast to share why they believed they lost the election. 

While the top advisers on the campaign were apparently aware of Harris’ polling deficit, this information was seemingly obscured to other relevant parties, including those soliciting capital from donors, such as Li. 

According to Li, it is ‘absolutely not’ normal for a campaign to obscure this type of information. 

‘I’ve been doing this since I graduated from college more than a decade [ago]. Absolutely not.’

She also shared that donors’ trust will need to be gained back because of the daylight between what the campaign was telegraphing about its situation and the reality. ‘But like for some casual donors, they’re going to be like, no f—ing way,’ Li said. 

‘It’s not that he’d beat her that’s a shock. It’s the extent to which he beat her. It wasn’t even close. It was a decisive defeat.’ 

Harris had rivaled Trump and even defeated him in numerous respected public polls across the country, which Plouffe acknowledged in the appearance.

‘When Kamala Harris became the nominee, she was behind. We kind of, you know, climbed back, and even post-debate, you know, we still had ourselves down, you know, in the battleground states, but very close. And so, I think, by the end, it was a jump-ball race,’ he said.