Attorney General
Pam Bondi said the Trump administration will be "targeting" hate speech, which she differentiated from free speech — and then tried to walk it back a day later.
"There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech," Bondi said in an interview with "The
Katie Miller Podcast" that aired Monday, appearing to shrug off First Amendment concerns.
Asked if the Justice Department would be cracking down on groups that engage in such speech, Bondi said, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything — and that’s across the aisle.”
“You can’t have that hate speech in the world in which we live,” she said. "There is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” Bondi said, referring to
Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was assassinated on a college campus in Utah last week.
Kirk took the opposite position on such speech in a
post on X last year.
"Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free," he wrote.
In an interview later Monday with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Bondi said that "we all believe in the First Amendment," but that people who've said "horrible things" about Kirk in the days since his murder should be held to account.
Trump seemed unconcerned about the remarks when asked about them Tuesday by a reporter for ABC News.
“We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they’ll come after ABC,” Trump said. “Maybe they’ll have to go after you,” he added.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration will be "targeting" hate speech, which she differentiated from free speech — and then tried to walk back a day later.
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