How Pam Bondi boosted Trump's election fraud claims in a key swing state

On the morning of Nov. 4, 2020, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi drove northeast from Washington to Philadelphia on an urgent mission: to monitor the tally of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots as President Donald Trump’s reelection hung in the balance.

Bondi and another Trump loyalist, Corey Lewandowski, quickly discovered that pandemic protocols were preventing Republican observers from closely scrutinizing ballots Trump had claimed were susceptible to fraud. So they called one of the president’s most high-profile hired guns — former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“I said, ‘Gee Pam … I don’t have the time,’” Giuliani recalled to a D.C. Bar committee that later ruled that his election challenge in Pennsylvania was grounds for disbarment. “I really didn’t want to go because I had so many things to organize, and it seemed to me that just one jurisdiction wasn’t worth sacrificing getting started in the others.”

Giuliani was swayed to join Bondi, Lewandowski and Trump’s younger son, Eric Trump, later that day at a news conference outside the Philadelphia airport, where Bondi declared: “We won Pennsylvania, and we want every vote to be counted in a fair way.”

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