Donald Trump’s MAGA allies are increasingly voicing concerns that Attorney General Pam Bondi has a blind spot for the damage caused by the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files. And that was before shetore her cornea.
Now, Bondi is in the eye of a storm that has enveloped all three branches of government, consuming the Washington agenda and siphoning oxygen from Trump’s policy priorities. The endgame remains a blur.
“She has very little time to turn this around,” said one House Republican, granted anonymity to describe the view inside the GOP conference.
Another noted that GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, the most vocal advocate for release of the files on disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, is on the Judiciary Committee, which is expected to hear Bondi’s testimony in a few weeks. Massie is working to force a floor vote on his bipartisan bill that would compel DOJ to release all of its Epstein documents.
“She is in for a rough September at the very least,” said a second House Republican.
Speaker Mike Johnson has in recent interviews demanded "transparency" around the Epstein files and said in a CBS interview aired Thursday that there are “good questions” about how Bondi’s Justice Department has handled the matter.
The ongoing saga — now in its third week — is a crisis of Trump allies’ own making: They’ve spent years stoking an unyielding belief that the federal government had obtained Epstein’s “client list,” allegedly proving that elite power brokers in Washington trafficked young girls. They also fomented conspiracy theories that Epstein — who died in prison in 2019 of an apparent suicide — was murdered ahead of his trial on a sex trafficking conspiracy. Trump, they believed, would release evidence proving their theories as soon as he took office, and many in the president’s orbit endorsed that conviction.
Yet, earlier this month, the Trump Justice Department concluded both theories were meritless and said they could not release any additional information because it largely consisted of vulgar and disturbing footage of Epstein’s alleged victims. Epstein killed himself, the FBI and Justice Department concluded, and there was no evidence to support a chargeable crime by anyone other than Epstein himself.
The fury from Trump’s MAGA allies was swift, most of it trained on Bondi herself, who told them in February that she was sitting on a mountain of evidence connected to the Epstein case. It has exposed fractures within the president’s base, creating an existential crisis that has dwarfed any others Trump has faced this term.
Scrutiny of the attorney general intensified even further on Wednesday when the Wall Street Journal and other outlets reported that Bondi told Trump in May that his name appears in some of the unreleased Epstein documents.
Bondi has not addressed the controversy in a public setting but has operated at a frenetic pace to shift focus to Trump’s other causes. On Wednesday, she announced a strike force to investigate potential crimes related to the 2016 investigation of Trump’s links to Russia. And on Tuesday, she said she was firing the judicially appointed replacement for interim U.S. attorney Alina Habba in New Jersey, escalating a fight with the courts that has frequently fired up Trump’s base.
Bondi had planned to speak at an anti-trafficking panel during the MAGA-dominated CPAC conference but sent a deputy, Matthew Galeotti, in her place after her cornea tear.
Those who know Bondi say despite the public furor, she’s unlikely to be cowed by the criticism.
“Pam is one of the most graceful and calm under pressure people I have ever dealt with. She doesn’t rattle and she’s not one of those people that when stress happens she lashes out. She is very calm, deliberate and stays the course,” said Brian Ballard, who runs the lobbying firm where Bondi worked before becoming attorney general.
The White House has continued to voice support for Bondi. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Bondi is “working tirelessly to end the weaponization that has rotted our justice system, remove violent criminals from our streets, and help President Trump in making America safe again. The President is appreciative of her efforts."
And Justice Department officials emphasize Bondi has released what she responsibly could without making public explicit sexual material involving minors.
But Bondi is, in some ways, now at the mercy of forces beyond her control.
Rising fury among House Republicans has guaranteed that the saga will outlast a sleepy August recess, with committees approving two bipartisan subpoenas: one for the entire Epstein case file, the other for a deposition with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-conspirator who is serving a 20-year-prison sentence for the sex trafficking conspiracy. The proceedings stemming from those demands will play out for weeks.
"I think she, from pillar to post, handled this thing so badly and bizarrely," said one senior House GOP aide.
"It was tough to watch the whole thing. We were just like 'What the fuck are they doing over there,’” the aide added.
On Friday, the Justice Department turned to the courts to help release some of the pressure, asking three judges for permission to publicly disclose grand jury transcripts stemming from Epstein and Maxwell’s criminal cases. But so far the department has slammed into roadblocks: the extremely inflexible rules governing grand jury secrecy. A judge in Florida has already denied DOJ’s request to unseal the materials, and two other requests in New York may remain pending for weeks after judges there asked for additional materials before ruling.
On Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche went a step further, interviewing Maxwell in Tallahassee.
Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, called the meeting “productive,” and told reporters that his client “answered every single question.”
“She never stopped, she never invoked a privilege, she never declined to answer,” he said. “She answered all the questions truthfully, honestly and to the best of her ability.” He declined to say whether Maxwell would be interviewed for a second day.
But the Justice Department has long housed deep doubts about her credibility, and Johnson echoed those doubts, too, in Wednesday remarks to reporters.
“Could she be counted on to tell the truth? Is she a credible witness? I mean, this is a person who's been sentenced to many, many years in prison for terrible, unspeakable, conspiratorial acts and acts against innocent young people,” Johnson said. “I mean, can we trust what she's going to say? … I don't know, but we'll have to see.”
Kimberly Leonard and Arek Sarkissian contributed to this report.
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