WASHINGTON >> Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, refused to explicitly say she would defy White House pressure — or admit that Trump lost the 2020 election — and instead offered a promise that “politics will not play a part” in her work at a confirmation hearing on Wednesday that repeatedly turned heated.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee accused her time and again of failing to answer simple questions on election denialism, prosecution of the news media and her stance on White House meddling in the department. Bondi sought to project the image of an independent, crime-fighting prosecutor, while repeatedly expressing loyalty to Trump and her belief that he had been the victim of politically motivated prosecution by the Biden administration.

Bondi tangled with both senators from California, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff. Schiff asked her if she saw any factual basis to investigate members of the congressional committee that examined the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Bondi refused to answer Schiff’s questions, calling them hypothetical, and said he should be more worried about crime rates in California.

Padilla demanded yes-or-no answers to questions about claims she had made about the 2020 election. Bondi would not provide one-word answers, instead embarking on longer responses that Padilla cut off, prompting her to accuse him of trying to bully her. “I guess you don’t want to hear my answer,” she said.

At one point, Bondi suggested that whatever presidential pardons for Jan. 6 defendants are coming, they may not be granted to those convicted of assaulting police officers. “I’m not going to speak for the president, but the president does not like people who abuse police officers either,” she said, when asked about the possibility of pardons for people who attacked officers.

Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, who represented Trump during one of his impeachment cases, faced deep skepticism from Democrats about whether she would be able to stand up to any efforts by Trump to prosecute his political opponents. “I need to know that you will tell the president no,” Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, said in his opening statement.

Republicans on the committee cast Bondi as a qualified pick who would prioritize border security — one of Trump’s favored issues — and end political interference in the Justice Department, which they repeatedly accused of being a tool of President Joe Biden.

But when Democrats asked Bondi about the possibility that Trump would attempt to weaponize the department or drop a case that the White House objected to, she pushed back against the premise, saying she wouldn’t have accepted the nomination if she thought that could happen.

Bondi also defended Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, who would technically report to her. She told the committee that she had not heard his statement about having a 60-person list of investigatory targets, one of several occasions she said she was not familiar with widely circulated remarks — including Trump’s infamous call with Georgia election officials about finding more votes after the 2020 election.

At one point, though, she distanced herself — asked about his position on the conspiratorial QAnon group, she said, “I look forward to hearing his testimony about QAnon in front of this committee.”