Democrats Furious at Pam Bondi Over Epstein Spying, Childhood Insults

WASHINGTON – Democrats are furious over revelations that the Justice Department is tracking lawmakers’ searches for Epstein files, with some saying Attorney General Pam Bondi should resign and others pushing to overhaul how lawmakers can view sensitive documents.

“We are in the middle of a cover-up, so we have to take advantage of the extremely embarrassing fact that they have been spying on us to come up with a completely different system for us to review these documents,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told News themezone.

Even House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), a leading defender of President Donald Trump, told reporters Thursday that he was investigating the matter and suggested the Justice Department had acted inappropriately.

“That would obviously be crossing an important line, and obviously we can’t allow that,” Johnson said.

The Justice Department this week set up a satellite office where lawmakers could review material the department had excluded from public disclosure required by a law passed last year. The office includes four computers, and lawmakers said department officials started them and remained in the room while they examined the material.

Still, the Justice Department did not tell lawmakers that the administration would monitor her behavior so closely in viewing and searching the files, and only learned about it after news photographers caught Bondi looking at a document titled “Jayapal Pramila Search History” when she was being questioned by the progressive Washington state representative during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday.

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The document was included in a folder Bondi had in front of her while testifying, which Raskin called a “burn book” and which mostly appeared to contain specific insults for her to hurl at Democratic committee members. He called Raskin a “failed lawyer,” for example, and accused him of not caring about a crime committed in his district by an undocumented immigrant.

The folder also apparently had lists of specific Epstein files that lawmakers had reviewed. In Jayapal’s case, the list included files labeled “thanks for a fun night, your youngest girl was a little naughty” and “new Brazilian newcomer, sexy and cute, 19 years old.”

Jayapal confirmed on Thursday that Bondi’s document showed the files he had sought. He told News themezone that Bondi is unfit to remain attorney general after her “horrible” performance.

“She’s supposed to be the town’s attorney general, the town’s lawyer, but yesterday she had a one-person hearing,” Jayapal said. “Her name was Donald Trump. She still acts as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, goes in and just insults members of Congress.”

Bondi served as Trump’s personal lawyer during his first impeachment trial in 2020 for his scheme to extort Ukraine into announcing a bogus corruption investigation against then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Jayapal said he had spoken with Johnson, who served alongside Bondi on Trump’s impeachment defense team, but declined to share details of the conversation.

Congress passed a law last fall requiring the Justice Department to place its files on Epstein in a searchable public database, with exceptions for material that would invade the privacy of his victims. The department has withheld millions of documents in what both Democrats and Republicans have called a violation of the law.

Epstein committed suicide in 2019 while facing charges of sex trafficking of minors. He had socialized with President Donald Trump until the two had an apparent falling out in the early 2000s. Trump’s past friendship with Epstein has raised doubts that his administration will allow people to see all the files.

A search for the word “Trump” returned more than 4,700 results on the Justice Department’s Epstein Library page on Thursday. Raskin has said that on the private server where lawmakers can view unredacted material, the president’s name appears in more than a million files. He and others said they learned from the Justice Department cache that some of the public records had been redacted incorrectly.

In addition to Congress passing a law requiring Epstein’s disclosure, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena for the material. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the committee’s top Democrat, told News themezone that Bondi should resign and be held in contempt of Congress.

“We already knew that the Justice Department is incredibly corrupt and that spying is what we’re looking for, I think the question has to be asked: Can we trust any of what the Justice Department is actually doing?” Garcia said.