The cracks are beginning to appear in the Epstein dam of lies and evil. On Wednesday, US attorney general (AG) Pam Bondi found herself in the same room, on Capitol Hill, as several survivors of the diabolical abuses by late financier Jeffrey Epstein and other perpetrators whose names are slowly, but surely, dripping into the public domain.
Bondi has made a career out of exhibiting a frosty hauteur under hostile grilling, but the strain showed as she tried to parry a series of ferocious interrogations from the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee.
The tone was set with opening remarks from ranking Democrat Jamie Raskin, who told Bondi that she “still hasn’t met with these survivors” before accusing her of “siding with the perpetrators and ignoring the victims”.
Some of the women who were abused by the Epstein cabal have gone public, and a group of survivors spoke on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning.
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“Many had not,” Raskin continued. “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.”
In a blistering summary of Bondi’s performance as AG, he accused her of “staggering incompetence, cold indifference and jaded cruelty towards more than 1,000 victims raped, abused and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up.”
Within minutes, Bondi had abandoned the sangfroid, raising her voice towards a series of Democrat representatives, insisting she would not “get into the gutter” with these people and, in a stout defence of US president Donald Trump’s record on lowering crime to a 125-year low and sealing the southern border, drawing guffaws as she invoked the unassailable performance of the US stock exchange.
“You don’t tell me anything,” she shouted at one point before turning to the Republican chair of the committee, Jim Jordan. “None of them asked Merrick Garland [the AG during the Biden administration] one word about Jeffrey Epstein. You know why... because Donald Trump... the Dow, the Dow is over 50,000 right now. I don’t know why you’re laughing, you’re a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin.”
The scenes were unedifying and unhinged. Bondi had help from the Republican members of the committee. And there is substance to her argument that during the four years when Joe Biden was president, Democrat politicians never seemed particularly interested in the Epstein files.
[ Powerful men are being damaged by the Epstein files. But not Trump’s friendsOpens in new window ]
But the broader problem, for the administration, is the loudening voices from GOP dissidents who are howling cover-up, and the Maga base who remain convinced the files contain proof of a demonic elite cabal.
On Tuesday night, Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, who, with Democrat representative Ro Khanna has driven the push for Bondi’s department of justice (DOJ) to release the remaining three million Epstein files and to allow politicians’ access to the original unredacted documents, added more fuel to the fire beneath the feet of Howard Lutnick.
The commerce secretary on Tuesday acknowledged he and his family had travelled by boat to meet Epstein for lunch on his island on a date in 2012, despite previously insisting, in a dramatic and vivid story, that he had vowed never to be in the same room with the late financier again back in 2005.
“The problem is: how do you have confidence in a secretary of commerce who lied about it recently? And he was forced only when he was sworn in to give a truthful answer. And I think it’s a matter of confidence in the people who are leading this country. And I don’t have confidence in someone who would lie like that,” Massie said.
Elsewhere, disenfranchised Maga loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned her House seat in January, continues to make pointed criticism, claiming in an interview this week that president Trump had asked her to take her name off the discharge petition because the full release would mean “that his friends would get hurt”.
“Look, Pam Bondi works directly for Donald Trump. She’s not an independent attorney general. She can’t just go out there and do whatever she wants. She works at the pleasure and approval of the president of the United States. Everybody in the administration does.”
Trump has been relatively subdued this week. On Wednesday, while Bondi squirmed in her seat, he issued a video featuring throwback footage merging an interview from his younger years with a campaign speech where he is proclaiming “I am your voice”.
That has been true of the Republican Party for a decade now. Trump’s voice has drowned out all others. But on Capitol Hill, Massie presented Bondi with documents he claimed were tantamount to a “massive failure by the DOJ to comply with the Epstein files transparency act” and grilled her about the redaction of the name of Les Wexner, the billionaire Victoria’s Secret founder, named as a co-conspirator in the sex-trafficking case in which Epstein was due to stand trial.
“This is a political joke and I need to give my answer on that,” Bondi said at one stage. “This guy has Trump derangement syndrome. You’re a failed politician.”
If it’s a joke, nobody is laughing. The deepening conviction is that the crimes of Epstein and those who used to keep his company is vast, and horrific, and not going away.
“This is bigger than Watergate,” Massie told Bondi.
“This goes over four administrations. You don’t have to back to Biden. Let’s go back to Obama, lets go back to George Bush. This cover-up goes back decades and you are responsible for this portion of it.”
