She came with a book full of insults, one for each congressperson. She obviously had one for me. And, you know, I’ve been there when Merrick Garland was there. Obviously, politically, I don’t agree with him, but he performed much better in terms of at least not looking bad. And, unfortunately, we didn’t get the answers we wanted about the Epstein Files Transparency Act from her. . . . . “Donald Trump told us that even though, you know, he had dinner with these kinds of people in New York City and West Palm Beach, that he would be transparent. But he’s not. He’s still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration, and they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
Sadly, everything the DOJ is doing currently is aimed at protecting the guilty, including the Felon. piece at The New Republic looks at where things stand:
During and right after Pam Bondi’s House testimony Wednesday, I flipped on Fox News and Newsmax to see how they were covering it. I was expecting to see a celebration of how the attorney general really put those America-hating libs in their place. To my surprise, I did not. I saw mostly ads, to be honest, but the little programming I did catch was devoted entirely to the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story.
Disappointed, I flipped back to MS NOW and didn’t think much of it. But Wednesday evening, The Daily Beast reported that my experience was not aberrational: Bondi testified for about five hours, and Fox News ran roughly 10 minutes of it live.
It’s an old, old Murdochian ploy: When there’s news that doesn’t suit the agenda, just ignore it. I’ve seen this movie many times. Back in a different era, Rupert’s favorite politician was Al D’Amato, the hacky and corrupt Republican senator from New York. Whenever there was a new allegation about D’Amato’s ethics, or a Senate report reviewing same, it would be on the front page of The New York Times and get prominent play in the Daily News—and in the New York Post, there usually wasn’t a word.
Fox’s near silence on Bondi is an admission that the hearing was an indefensible horror show. And it gets worse if you really think about it for a few minutes. Think of all the planning and strategizing that went into that performance. Employees of the Department of Justice, working on our dime, spent hours prepping Bondi on exactly how to insult each and every Democratic member of the committee. They came up with the idea of requiring each House member to have an individual log-in to peruse the Epstein files so the DOJ could spy on them. They spent hours assembling Bondi’s little burn book. She had to have been coached for hours about exactly how to ignore the questions and try to turn the tables on her interrogators. In other words: Her aides, whose salaries we pay, probably thought this would be great. That she’d walk away with a catalog of sound-bite knockout punches.
Instead, Bondi walked away with the image that will haunt her for the rest of her life: her back turned to those Jeffrey Epstein victims as Representative Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands “if you have still not been able to meet with the DOJ”—and they all raised their hands. That image looked horrible Wednesday; as more and more details about the Epstein story leak out in the coming weeks and months, it’s only going to look worse.
In substantive terms, her performance at that hearing may not even have been the worst thing Bondi did this week! The morning after the hearing, she fired Gail Slater, the head of the department’s antitrust division. Slater actually had a decent reputation—she was part of the populist-MAGA anti-monopoly movement, and she brought a high-profile case against Google over its monopolization of the ad tech market.
Many progressive anti-monopolists were cheering for Slater. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren upon hearing this news: “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder. . . . . Bondi’s firing of Slater is a big nail in the coffin of the idea that Trumpian right-wing populism is willing to take on powerful interests. It may—but only as long as they’re designated enemies of Trump.
To circle back to Fox News: If they’re going to follow the old Murdoch edict of ignoring all bad news, pretty soon they’re going to be reduced to airing nothing but scare stories about woke Olympic athletes and Spanish-speaking superstars.
It’s not even clear Bondi had the worst week among Trump Cabinet officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got seriously pulverized twice this week. First, when a grand jury refused to indict six Democrats for their earlier video reminding soldiers that they had a duty to disobey illegal orders; as Chesa Boudin and Eric Fish point out in a Times op-ed today, grand juries convened by the mighty Justice Department almost never fail to return an indictment. Second, when a federal judge blocked Hegseth from punishing one of the six, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, writing that Hegseth had grossly violated Kelly’s First Amendment rights.
And Kristi Noem had to endure the indignity of seeing rival Tom Homan, the border czar, make her ICE-men goeth out of Minneapolis. Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal posted a long and devastating story about the mayhem at the Department of Homeland Security under Noem and her rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski. It’s the kind of Washington story that appears only when inside sources decide to start running to reporters to spill saucy details they once sat on—a clear sign that no one is scared of her anymore.
None of these people, of course, belongs in a high position in the federal government. They’re psychopathic monsters. There’s no doubt Bondi and her advisers think she knocked a home run on Wednesday. But one day, we’ll all learn what she’s hiding about the Epstein story. Can’t wait for that hearing.
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