It wasn’t difficult. It was to be straight forward. She was brought in before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions…direct questions.
But as we have come to witness from all of the members of this administration, direct questions very rarely, if ever, are met with a direct answer.
Remember, answers are in fact responses, but responses are not necessarily answers. Someone who is a prosecutor would know the difference.
So why hasn’t Pamela Bondi been cooperative during her appearances with either the Senate or the House of Representatives? Isn’t her job to be responsible and answer for such operations that the legislative branch is entitled to have oversight and request answers?
First, there needs to be an understanding of the role of the Attorney General of the United States.
This is straight from the DOJ’s website:
History
The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the Office of the Attorney General which evolved over the years into the head of the Department of Justice and chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government. The Attorney General represents the United States in legal matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive departments of the Government when so requested. In matters of exceptional gravity or importance the Attorney General appears in person before the Supreme Court. Initially the position of Attorney General was created as a one-person, part-time position. However, the workload quickly became too much for one person. For a time, private attorneys were retained to assist the Attorney General.
Since June 1870, Congress enacted a law entitled “An Act to Establish the Department of Justice,” with the Attorney General as head of the new executive department, the United States Department of Justice. This Act gave the Attorney General direction and control of U.S. Attorneys and all other counsel employed on behalf of the United States. The Attorney General has guided the world’s largest law office and the central agency for enforcement of federal laws.
Mission
The mission of the Office of the Attorney General is to supervise and direct the administration and operation of the 40 components comprising the Department of Justice.
Major Functions
The principal duties of the Attorney General are to:
- Represent the United States in legal matters.
- Supervise and direct the administration and operation of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Bureau of Prisons, Office of Justice Programs and the U.S. Attorneys and U.S. Marshals Service, which are all within the Department of Justice.
- Supervise and direct the administration and operation of the offices, boards, divisions, and bureaus that comprise the Department.
- Furnish advice and opinions, formal and informal, on legal matters to the President and the Cabinet and to the heads of the executive departments and agencies of the government, as provided by law.
- Make recommendations to the President concerning appointments to federal judicial positions and to positions within the Department, including U.S. Attorneys and U.S. Marshals.
- Represent or supervise the representation of the United States Government in the Supreme Court of the United States and all other courts, foreign and domestic, in which the United States is a party or has an interest as may be deemed appropriate.
- Perform or supervise the performance of other duties required by statute or Executive Order.
How did she even GET this job in the first place? Bondi was the Attorney General of the State of Florida for eight years, from 2011 to 2019. In March of 2016, it was discovered that the Trump Foundation had broken the law by giving an illegal $25,000 contribution to a political group supporting then Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Charitable foundations like the Trump Foundation are not allowed to engage in politics. And that contribution was given as Bondi’s office was deciding whether to take legal action related to Trump University. Which it did not.
And it should be noted, Bondi showcased that she was on a crusade to stop sex and human trafficking.
Pamela Bondi, as a long-time prosecutor, knows that an attorney is strictly prohibited from lying under oath, as it constitutes perjury, a criminal offense. Attorneys are barred by the Rules of Professional Conduct from knowingly making false statements or providing false evidence to the Court…it’s called Candor to the Tribunal.
I think Ms. Bondi seems to have forgotten that when she was speaking in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. James Jordan (R-OH) gave every indication that he was granting Pamela Bondi a LOT of latitude because HE seemed to forget that ” answers are in fact responses, but responses are not necessarily answers.” It was quite obvious that he was in Bondi’s corner because he allowed her to evade every direct question throughout the hearing.
Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) was deliberate in delivering a scathing opening statement. Here it is, in its entirety:
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome, Attorney General Bondi.
You’ve got the best lawyer’s job in America. Your mission is justice and your clients are the American people.
But, to promote justice for the people, you must listen to the victims, like the women seated behind you. They’re some of the hundreds of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s global sex trafficking ring demanding the truth for America and accountability for the abusers who trafficked and raped them. You still haven’t met with these survivors.
So with their permission, let me introduce to you the survivors and late survivors’ family members who are present today:
Theresa Helm; Jess Michaels; Lara Blume McGee; Dani Bensky; Liz Stein; Marina Lacerda; Sky and Amanda Roberts, who are the family of the late Virginia Giuffre; Sharlene Lund; Rachel B.; and Lisa Phillips.
Now, you’re not showing a lot of interest in the victims, Madam Attorney General.
Whether it’s Epstein’s human trafficking ring or the homicidal governmental violence against citizens in Minneapolis, as Attorney General, you’re siding with the perpetrators and you’re ignoring the victims. That will be your legacy unless you act quickly to change course.
You’re running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Justice Department. You’ve been ordered by a subpoena and by Congress to turn over six million documents, photographs and videos in the Epstein files but you’ve turned over only three million. You say you’re not turning over the other 3 million because they’re somehow duplicative. But we know that there are actual memos of victim statements in there.
And you also took down the Department of Justice’s prosecution memo from 2019. So it’s clearly not all duplicative. But even if it were, why not release it, just release all the duplicative stuff.
In the half you did produce, you redacted the names of abusers, enablers, accomplices and coconspirators, apparently to spare them embarrassment and disgrace, which is the exact opposite of what the law ordered you to do.
Even worse, you shockingly failed to redact many of the victims’ names, which is what you were ordered to do by Congress. Some of the victims had come forward publicly, but many had not. Many had kept their torment private, even from family and friends. But you published their names, their identities, their images on thousands of pages for the world to see. So you ignored the law.
And even with over 100,000 employees at your disposal, you acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference, and jaded cruelty towards more than 1,000 victims raped, abused and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up.
Convicted sex trafficker and groomer Ghislaine Maxwell “opened the gates of hell” to Virginia Giuffre and hundreds of other victims, as Virginia recorded in her remarkable book Nobody’s Girl. But when Maxwell was subpoenaed to testify before Congress, you and Todd Blanche quickly moved her from a higher-security prison to a minimum-security camp in Texas where she’s enjoyed five-star treatment, including catered meals, private gym time, and access to a therapy puppy. All because Todd Blanche, who has utterly failed to investigate the monstrous crimes of Epstein and Maxwell’s co-conspirators, spent nine hours with Maxwell to satisfy himself she would have nothing untoward to say about Donald Trump, which is your only real interest in this whole matter.
But abandoning victims and coddling perpetrators is what you do best. When the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the brutal killing in Minneapolis of Renée Good, a poet and 37-year-old mother of three, by Trump’s masked paramilitary ICE agents, you shut it down. You claim you’re investigating the cold-blooded murder of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the VA, but how can we trust the Administration when the President and Kristi Noem call Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and Stephen Miller called him a “would-be assassin”? Not only do you refuse to share evidence with the state and local investigators and prosecutors in Minnesota, but you blocked their access to the crime scene and the evidence.
How are you seeking justice for Marimar Martinez, the Montessori school teacher in Chicago who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent who bragged about it over text; or the family of Keith Porter Jr., a father of two shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent in LA; or the family of Silverio Villegas González, shot and killed in Illinois minutes after dropping his children at school? There’s no sign of any movement at the Department of Justice. You even launched a criminal investigation into Renée Good’s grieving widow.
But it’s even worse. You’ve turned the People’s Department of Justice into Trump’s instrument of revenge.
Donald Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time. He tells you to go after James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, and Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve Board, and Members of the United States Congress including Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Chrissy Houlahan, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio and Maggie Goodlander to name just a few. And you snap to it. You replace real prosecutors with counterfeit stooges who robotically do the president’s bidding. Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice function and contamination of federal law enforcement.
The good news is many serious lawyers at DOJ, including your very own political appointees—your own people—have refused your lawless orders.
Danielle Sassoon, your original pick for Acting U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, resigned rather than follow your corrupt order to quash an indictment against Mayor Eric Adams as a political favor from Donald Trump. A Federalist Society member who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, U.S. Attorney Sassoon refused to participate in this blatantly corrupt scheme. Her top assistant, Hagan Scotten, an Iraq War veteran and two-time Bronze Star recipient who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and then-Judge Kavanaugh, promptly resigned too, writing to your office: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
You and the President nominated Erik Siebert, a fifteen-year career prosecutor, to be your U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. But after five months investigating Letitia James and James Comey, Siebert found no evidence to justify criminal charges. So you forced him out and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s personal lawyer from the Mar-a-Lago documents case, who had zero prosecutorial experience and no qualifications. And then you were humiliated when a federal judge found that this corrupt appointment was blatantly unlawful and threw out Halligan’s indictments entirely. And grand juries of American citizens have repeatedly rejected your vendettas and baseless indictments brought by the hacks left at DOJ now, with two different grand juries in Virginia voting down indictments against Letitia James in a single week. Just yesterday, another grand jury shut down your vendetta factory by rejecting an indictment against the six Members of Congress who had reminded service members that they have a duty to refuse illegal orders.
You tried to get a grand jury to indict six Members of Congress who were veterans of our armed forces, on charges of seditious conspiracy, simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. I hope you will heed the wisdom and the constitutional patriotism of those grand jurors and not try it again by doubling down on that humiliation.
As your best lawyers are sacked for having participated in the January 6 case or just flee for the exits now, your new lawyers keep lying in court. In dozens of cases, your lawyers have been excoriated for lying to federal courts. Chief Judge Boasberg, right here in the District of Columbia, suggested your DOJ presented “a fraud on the court.” Other judges found your DOJ’s statements to be “inexplicably misleading,” “patently incredible,” “totally inconsistent,” and “so disingenuous that the Court is left with little confidence that the [government] can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.”
Now, as Ranking Member, I asked the Chairman to add a few extra rounds of questions today because we each have five hours of questions, not five minutes, but we’re stuck with five minutes. That’s clearly insufficient to give voice to America’s victims and survivors and demand answers about the corruption and cover-ups that have overtaken your Department.
We have just one round, so we ask you politely but firmly, Madam Attorney General: please don’t waste one second of our precious time by evading our questions, changing the subject, randomly reciting statistics to eat up time, or engaging in personal attacks against Members of Congress. We saw your performance in the Senate and we aren’t going to accept that. This isn’t a game. In the Senate, you brought a burn book, a binder of smears, to attack Members personally for doing the people’s work of oversight. Please set the burn book aside and answer our questions. And when you hear us reclaim our time, that means it’s time for you to stop speaking. We only have five minutes, so when we reclaim our time, that means you stop. And if you don’t, we will ask the Chair to stop the clock and let you go on his time.
The quality of justice in America depends on the character of our government. Please do your job and bring the Department of Justice back from the brink. The survivors seated behind you, and the American people watching everywhere, deserve a Department of Justice worthy of its name.
I yield back.”
Pamela Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States, simply wouldn’t answer the questions posed to her by the members of the House Judiciary Committee. Rather, she responded with a prepared statement about another subject, or launched into personal attacks on the individual asking the question. When the member persisted and again requested she answer a question, she stated that she doesn’t want to answer that question, but wanted to address a different question.
She is the Attorney General of the United States, a former prosecutor. She, of ALL people, should understand that you are there to answer questions. You are not in the position of ignoring the question or refusing to answer it. You are certainly not there to make demands of the people who called upon you to offer up explanations…explanations to very important and concerning matters. And, of course, you are not there to haul insults at your hosts.
If the roles were reversed you can bet the person SHE was questioning would be held in contempt.
Rep. Pramilia Jayapal (D-WA) had a lot to say to Pamela Bondi. But it was when she asked Bondi if she would turn and look at the victims and apologize for the way their cases have been handled that it became apparent Bondi was going to display indifference and defiance to the victims…and throughout the hearing.
Bondi refused to turn around, refused to even acknowledge the victims and family members standing behind her. Rather, she smirked and played with her hair.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) asked her “I really just have one question for you. How many of Jerry Epstein’s co-conspirators have you indicted? How many perpetrators are you even investigating?”
Bondi’s response: “First you showed a…I find…”
Nadler: “Just answer my question…how many have you indicted?”
Bondi: “Excuse me. No I am going to answer the question the way I want to answer the question. Your theatrics are ridiculous. Chairman Jordan I am not going to get in the gutter with these people. But I am going to answer the question.”
Nadler: “Again, how many have you indicted?”
Bondi: “They don’t like the answer, Chairman, because it’s honest. He asks a four-minute question and I am going to answer.”
House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD): “You can let her filibuster all she wants but not on our time. And I told you about that Madame Attorney General.”
Bondi: “YOU DON’T TELL ME ANYTHING….you’re washed up…you’re not even a lawyer.”
Raskin: “I DID tell you because I saw what you did in the Senate.”
After Nadler was able to claim his time back, Bondi never answered the question. But the answer was “0”…not a single person has been indicted and other than Ghislane Maxwell, no other co-conspirators have been even investigated.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) after making it clear that anyone who patronizes any of the events involving sex trafficking is committing a crime, and displaying pictures of former Prince Andrew with an underage victim at an Epstein event, he asked Bondi: “Why did you shut down the case and not purse charges against Prince Andrew?”
Bondi: “I don’t believe you asked Merrick Garland these questions when he was Attorney General.”
Lieu: “I agree with you….Merrick Garland dropped the ball. As did Bill Barr…and Alex Acosta…a whole string of failures. But you are in charge…you have the power to change things and hold these men accountable. And you’re doing the opposite. You’re protecting them. I want to move on to another man, Donald Trump, who is all over the Epstein files. Here’s a video. (And he shows the oft-shown video of Trump and Epstein together where Trump whispers in Epstein’s ear and Epstein bends over laughing.) Like former Prince Andrew, Donald Trump attended various parties with Jeffrey Epstein. I want to know were there any underage girls at that party or ANY party that Trump attended with Jeffrey Epstein?”
Bondi: “This is so ridiculous and they are trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT DONALD TRUMP HAS COMMITTED A CRIME…EVERYONE KNOWS THAT. This has been THE most transparent Presidency…HE’S the one…”
Lieu: “I am going to have to reclaim my time.”
Chairman Jordan: “The time belongs to the gentleman from California.”
Lieu: “I am going to put up another document from a witness who called FBI’s national threat operation center because I believe you just lied under oath. There is ample evidence in the Epstein files…”
Bondi: “DON’T YOU EVER accuse me of a crime.”
Lieu: “I believe you just lied under oath and this is on video. You said there’s no evidence of a crime I’m showing you here is a witness statement called into the FBI threat operations center…he drove Donald Trump around in a limo, he overheard what Donald Trump said to Jeffrey Epstein on his cell phone….he met a girl who said she was raped by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and later had her head blown off….no one…NO ONE…from the Department of Justice interviewed this witness. You need to interview this witness IMMEDIATELY. Epstein should rot in hell…so should the men who patronized his operation and as we sit here today there are over 1,000 sex trafficking victims and you have not held a single man accountable…SHAME ON YOU! If you had any decency you would resign right after this hearing.”
Bondi: “May I answer the question?”
Chairman Jordan: “I don’t know how you respond to that…but ok.”
Bondi: “He doesn’t want to talk about crime in California. He does not want to talk about crime in his state.”
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) very calmly asked the Attorney General of the United States a very specific question. In her usual form, Bondi in her condescending and snarky attitude gave a snippy, flippant response. That response played right into a prosecutor’s hands. Something a prosecutor should be smart enough to know. However, her arrogance and total disregard for decorum, and disrespect for members of Congress, as well as the Senate, sunk her.
Perhaps this scene from the Godfather II might just trigger something?
“…you may very well be subject to indictment for perjury…”
Bondi spent most of the time not paying attention to the person speaking and/or asking the questions of her, playing with her hair, looking at papers, or looking for the page in her burn book to get to that person’s page of insults.
Rather than address the horrific crimes that have come under scrutiny, she admonished members of the Committee for asking questions about the Epstein saga, claimed that Donald Trump was the most transparent President in the nation’s history, and then for some God forsaken reason veered off course – like she skipped a few pages of notes – and talked about the Dow Jones Industrial Average going above 50,000. And when members of the Committee laughed at her, she asked, “I don’t know why you are laughing?”
She doesn’t know why they were laughing at her? Why were they laughing at her? Anyone? Anyone?
To sum up Bondi’s display, one can take a page out of the history books, a time period better forgotten, during the dark McCarthy era. Attorney Joseph Welch asked Senator Joseph McCarthy on June 9, 1954, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, when Welch challenged McCarthy’s cruel, reckless tactics.
“You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
