In February, US attorney-general Pam Bondi declared in an interview with Fox News that the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein’s client list was “sitting” on her desk. But the announcement, originally seen as fulfilling Donald Trump’s campaign promise to release files on Epstein’s death, has now come back to haunt Bondi — and the president.

Since the Department of Justice and FBI last week published a memo saying there was no “client list” and no “credible evidence” that Epstein “blackmailed prominent individuals”, the affair has threatened to consume a woman regarded as one of the most powerful — and loyal — members of Trump’s cabinet.

The U-turn has incensed the president’s base, which has long been in thrall to conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death. Maga activists have called for Bondi’s departure, while the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson, a staunch Trump ally, has called on the attorney-general to “come forward and explain . . . to everybody”.

The administration changed course again on Thursday, with Bondi saying she would ask a US court to unseal grand jury transcripts linked to Epstein at the request of the president. This came after the Wall Street Journal revealed Trump allegedly sent Epstein a “bawdy” letter for the financier’s birthday, which the president said was fake.

Until the issue blew up in recent days, Bondi had been busy reshaping the DoJ in the president’s image, firing perceived opponents and launching enforcement actions to further his policy agenda, including immigration crackdowns and probes of treatments of transgender children.

The blowback has also forced Trump, who admitted to being Epstein’s friend for 15 years before claiming they had fallen out, to chide his own supporters in a bid to quell the uproar and defend Bondi. He chastised “stupid Republicans” for falling for the “Epstein hoax . . . perpetrated by the Democrats”. Bondi, he wrote in a post on Truth Social, was “doing a FANTASTIC JOB”.

On Tuesday, Bondi brushed off reporters’ questions about Epstein, adding that she would remain in her role “as long as the president wants me here and I believe he’s made that crystal clear, it’s four years”.

Under Bondi, says Stacey Young, founder of Justice Connection, a group supporting DoJ staff, the department is “focused on defending the president. If there are career employees who are perceived as not furthering that goal, they have been fired in large numbers and the department has really become a shell of its former self”.

The extent of Bondi’s involvement in staffing moves remains unclear. But “the buck stops with her”, says Young.

Bondi is close to Trump — she joined the defence team for his first impeachment trial and defended his efforts to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election. But she is regarded by some observers as more qualified than other loyalist appointees to the president’s cabinet.

Bondi, who was born in Tampa, Florida in 1965, rose through the ranks of the legal profession in her native state, home to Trump’s “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. Her 18 years as a prosecutor were spent in the city’s Hillsborough County, where she tried cases ranging from death-penalty murder to domestic violence.

She then served as Florida’s state attorney-general for two terms, the first woman to occupy the role. There she clamped down on pain clinic “pill mills” and backed several state laws aimed at quashing illicit substance abuse.

Her career set her apart from Trump’s first nominee for attorney-general, Matt Gaetz, a former congressman with limited legal experience who withdrew amid allegations he used illegal drugs and paid for sex.

Dave Aronberg, who faced Bondi in the Florida attorney-general race as a Democratic candidate, says that while he disagrees with some of her moves, he does not believe she would go as far as bringing trumped up charges against political enemies. “That to me is the red line,” says Aronberg, whom Bondi later hired as a drug tsar.

Bondi’s ethical record, however, has already come under scrutiny. In 2013, days after she received a $25,000 political donation from Trump, she declined to proceed with a probe into alleged fraud at Trump University, a now defunct for-profit college accused of deceptive business practices. Trump ultimately paid $25mn to settle lawsuits by students and the New York state attorney-general.

Bondi’s former colleagues describe her as a tough prosecutor who took on complex cases. “She was absolutely excellent,” says Nick Cox, who supervised Bondi in Hillsborough County in the 1990s. “She controlled the courtroom . . . [and] jurors just loved her.”

Her resolve was also on display in a dispute over a dog she adopted after it survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A legal fight with the St Bernard’s original owners captured media attention and concluded with Bondi returning the dog after initial resistance. She later got a new pet — another St Bernard.

It is unclear if pressure on Bondi will subside. Dick Durbin, the Democratic senator from Illinois, on Thursday said Trump and Bondi were “directly responsible for all this confusion and mistrust, and they . . . should release all of the [Epstein] documents for the public to review as quickly as possible”.

But Aronberg says Bondi is “not going anywhere”. Her loyalty to the president is “sincere” and “Trump knows that”.