AG Pam Bondi declines to comment on Epstein, Comey probes

Washington – Atty. General Pam Bondi took a provocative tone on Tuesday during an audience in the Senate where she dodged a series of questions on the brewing of scandals that rekindled her agency.

Bondi, a loyalist of Trump, refused to discuss his conversations with the White House on the recent act of former director of the FBI James Comey and the deployment of federal troops in the cities managed by the Democrats.

She diverted questions about an alleged corruption program involving the president’s border adviser and refused to develop her treatment of Jeffrey Epstein’s investigation.

In many cases, Bondi’s testimony before the Senate’s judicial committee turned into personal attacks against the Democrats, who expressed their dismay of their inability to make it respond to their surveys.

“It is supposed to be a surveillance audience in which the members of the congress can obtain serious answers to serious questions on the concealment of corruption on the pursuit of the president’s enemies,” said senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) Towards the end of the hearing of almost five hours. “When will it be that the members of this committee on a bipartite basis require answers to these questions?”

His testimony came while the Ministry of Justice faced increased accusations that he is armed against the political enemies of President Trump.

He marked a continuation of what has become a characteristic not only of Bondi, but most of the main officials of Trump. When they supported potential scandals that the president has taken it very difficult to avoid publicly, they turn almost universally towards a tactic: to ignore and attack the questioner.

This strategy was shown in an exchange between Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Who wanted to know who decided to close an investigation into Trump’s border adviser, Tom Homan. Homan would have accepted $ 50,000 in cash from FBI agents infiltrated after indicating that he could obtain government contracts. Bondi refused to say and moved attention to Padilla.

“I want you to love your California state as much as you hate President Trump,” said Bondi. “We would then be in very good shape because violent crimes in California are currently 35% higher than the national average.”

Between the partisan attacks, the hearing of the congress allowed Bondi to boast of his eight months in power. She said her goal was to combat illegal immigration, violent crimes and the restoration of public confidence at the Ministry of Justice, who said he said that officials of the Biden era armed against Trump.

“They wanted to remove President Trump from the playground,” she said about the effort to charge Trump. “It is the kind of conduct that breaks the faith of the American people in our system of application of the law. We will work to win it every day. We return to our main mission to fight against real crime. ”

She defended the deployment by the administration of federal troops in Washington, DC and Chicago, where she said that troops had been sent on Tuesday. Bondi refused to say if the White House has consulted him on the deployment of troops in American cities, but said that the effort was intended to “protect” citizens against violent crimes.

Senator Chris Coons (D-Del) has asked questions about the legal justification for military shooting ships crossing the Carribe Sea off Venezuela. The administration said that the boats transported drugs, but Coons told Bondi that “Congress had never authorized such use of military force”.

“We do not know how the administration concluded that strikes are legal,” said Coons.

Bondi told Coons that she would not discuss the legal advice that his department had given to the president on this subject, but said that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “is a narcoterorist” and that “drugs from Venezuela kill our children at record levels.”

Coons said he was “seriously concerned” that she did not direct a department that made decisions that “contained the fundamental values ​​of the Constitution”. As another example, he stressed that Trump urged him to continue his political opponents, like Comey.

Senator Dick Durbin (D-ill.) The best democrat of the committee, raised a similar concern at the start of the hearing, saying that Bondi “systematically armed the main law enforcement agency in our country to protect President Trump and his allies”.

“In eight months, you have fundamentally transformed the Ministry of Justice and left a huge task on American history,” said Durbin. “It will take decades to recover.”