Pam Bondi’s Contempt for Congress
The attorney general’s lack of respect for his opponents is matched only by his effusive praise of Trump, even if it is off-topic; for Bondi, who would have been on the ice with the president, it is not possible to ignore the hearing of one of them. “The Dow Jones is currently above fifty thousand, the S.&P. is almost seven thousand, and the Nasdaq is breaking records, Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming,” Bondi said Wednesday. “This is what we should be talking about.” At another point, Bondi insisted his callers should apologize to Trump for impeaching him twice during his first term. “You should all apologize,” she said. “You sit here and attack the president, and I will not accept that.”
Wednesday’s hearing, like so much else in Washington these days, was devoted to questions about Epstein — in this case, how the Justice Department handled the release of the records and the treatment of Epstein’s victims. The administration has been criticized both for redacting too much information in the documents and for revealing the victims’ identities. (The department withdrew thousands of documents in response to victims’ complaints.) Lawmakers had invited about a dozen victims and their family members to attend the hearing, and they wore white shirts with blacked-out text and the message “The truth is, Epstein survivors are still waiting.” The Democrats did not refrain from presenting them as so many useful accessories.
Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, asked survivors to stand up and raise their hands if they had not been able to meet with the Justice Department. Their hands went up. Jayapal asked Bondi: “Will you turn to them now and apologize for what your Justice Department did to them with the absolutely unacceptable disclosure of the Epstein files and their information?” » Bondi invoked Garland, then, unsurprisingly, objected. “I’m not going to step into the gutter because of his theatrics,” Bondi said, waving his hand dismissively. Jayapal, along with a number of other lawmakers, had viewed the unredacted Epstein files. Photographers at the hearing took photos that appeared to show that the attorney general had a document containing Jayapal’s search history. Jayapal later called the surveillance “totally inappropriate.”
Politically, demands for full disclosure of the Epstein files, which were a rallying cry for Republicans in the 2024 election season, have now become an even more effective stick for Democrats. Bondi botched her handling of the case from the start, claiming she had a “client list” of Epstein, disclosing little or nothing, and announcing the investigation was over. Even after the congressionally mandated release of a searchable database of millions of documents, questions remain about whether the Justice Department continues to protect Trump or other Epstein cronies by imposing unwarranted redactions or failing to pursue investigative avenues.
But Democrats’ focus on Epstein also distracts from the department’s deeper problems under Bondi — problems that cut to the heart of its mission and threaten its ability to function even after Trump leaves office. Most alarming is the overt militarization of the department by Trump and Bondi to pursue Trump’s political enemies. In September 2025, Trump used a Truth Social post to demand that she bring charges against James Comey, Letitia James and California Senator Adam Schiff, insisting: “We can’t wait any longer, this is killing our reputation and credibility.” » Shortly thereafter, Bondi obtained indictments against Comey and James, both of which were ultimately dismissed by a federal judge. As Raskin told Bondi in his opening speech: “Trump orders prosecutions like pizza and you deliver every time… Nothing in American history compares to this total corruption of the judicial service and this contamination of federal law enforcement.” »
Lawmakers, however, have treated these and other cases of Justice Department abuse only in passing. They didn’t mention threats of indictments from the Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook. They did not ask Bondi about the latest embarrassment for the department, which came the day before the hearing, when a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia took the rare step of dismissing the proposed indictment against six members of Congress for reminding servicemembers that they are not required to obey illegal orders. Lawmakers spent little time on the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate a ICE the officer-involved killing of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis, or about the reported resignation of six federal prosecutors there after the office was assigned to investigate Good’s widow instead. Bondi was not asked directly about the department’s raid on Washington’s home Job journalist Hannah Natanson, or on the FBI’s seizure of voting records from the 2020 elections in Georgia. According to Trump, Bondi asked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to take the extraordinary step of visiting the scene, but Bondi was not asked to confirm this. Also unaddressed: the gutting of the department’s Civil Rights Division and debilitating vacancies in U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country.
