“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Bondi said on the podcast.

The attorney general faced immense backlash from the left and the right over her comments, prompting her to clarify the remarks, which were widely interpreted as calling for unlawful prosecutions, on Tuesday morning.

Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.

Under 18 U.S.C. §…

— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) September 16, 2025

“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over,” Bondi wrote in a post on X Tuesday.

Jonathan Adler, a professor at William & Mary Law School, told the Washington Examiner that despite Bondi’s attempt to adjust her statement, it does not change that “hate speech” is not a prosecutable offense.

“She’s basically trying to backfill,” Adler said. “Yes, true threats and incitement can be prosecuted. But that does not mean ‘hate speech,’ as such, can be prosecuted. Plenty of awful, hateful speech comes nowhere close to being incitement or a true threat.”

‘Hate speech’ protected under the First Amendment

In the United States, there is no legal definition of “hate speech,” but the term has typically been used to define speech expressing animosity or bigotry toward particular groups of people.

Carolyn Iodice, legislative and policy director for the pro-free speech group FIRE, told the Washington Examiner that the law does not allow the DOJ to bring criminal or civil charges for that kind of speech.

“Hate speech is not a legal concept, and there’s no First Amendment exception for it,” Iodice said.

The First Amendment, which prevents the government from making laws that abridge freedom of expression, has regularly been found to broadly protect free speech when challenges reach the Supreme Court. One of the most recent cases includes the high court’s 2017 decision in Matal v Tam, in which the justices ruled that a law preventing trademarks of disparaging terms was unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Casey Mattox, a constitutional lawyer and vice president for legal strategy at Stand Together, told the Washington Examiner that while some speech is abhorrent, it does not mean it is illegal.

“I think people have seen plenty of examples over the last week, and for a long time, there’s plenty of speech that all Americans should reject,” Mattox said. “But that doesn’t mean it can be prosecuted as hate speech, because that’s just not a thing.”

Only imminent threats may be prosecuted under the law

Bondi later attempted to qualify her comments by citing U.S. code outlawing threats against public officials, members of Congress, or their families, along with a law outlawing transmitting messages that contain “any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.” She also claimed other sweeping types of speech were unlawful.

“You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech.’ These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law. Free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence,” Bondi said in her Tuesday X post.

The narrow exception to free speech that the Justice Department can prosecute is incitement or threats of imminent harm, but these exceptions are incredibly limited. Incitement and threats of imminent harm would need to be specific toward someone and at a specific time rather than vague wishes of someone’s death or celebrations of someone’s death.

“It’s not just death aspirations, but death threats,” Mattox said. “So even being happy that people died – as reprehensible as it is – is not a death threat, or even being happy that someone would die. That is a terrible, disgusting thing, but it’s also not prosecutable, it’s not illegal.”

Iodice also argued that the exceptions are “extremely narrow,” but not everything Bondi listed is necessarily unlawful depending on whether it reaches the level of incitement or an imminent threat of harm.

“She’s right to say that speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is not protected, assuming she means true threats,” Iodice told the Washington Examiner. “But then she goes on to list all sorts of things that would not cross the line into true threats.”

Mattox noted that the First Amendment’s “very explicit” nature of protecting speech is important for upholding it as a principle and added that the Supreme Court has ensured that the exceptions to it are “very, very limited.”

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The Justice Department continued to step back from Bondi’s initial statement on Tuesday, noting it would not go after “nasty speech” but only true incitements of violence.

“We are not prosecuting people for nasty speech alone — but true incitement to violence, or hate-motivated attacks, are illegal and will be treated as such by this DOJ,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a post on X Tuesday.