Pam Bondi is trying to distance herself from Epstein accountability

Former U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi demonstrated Friday that she would rather the public believe the controversy surrounding the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files belongs to someone else now — perhaps acting Attorney General Todd Blanche or FBI Director Kash Patel.

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It doesn’t. 

Bondi owns every decision she made as attorney general. And before she was ousted by Trump in April, she ran a department that refused to meet with Epstein survivors, stalled disclosure demands and fought transparency even after Congress overwhelmingly ordered it.

But the decision to refuse meetings with Epstein survivors and their attorneys stands out. Those survivors are women, many of whom were victimized as children, and they have spent years fighting a legal system and a political system that protected their abusers. They asked for a meeting. Bondi said no. She refused to even acknowledge their presence at her last congressional hearing.

Something else that stands out is a meeting Bondi’s Justice Department did make time for. Last November, Rep. Lauren Boebert was summoned to the White House Situation Room, a space usually reserved for matters of national security, where she was pressured not to support a discharge petition that would force a floor vote on disclosing the Epstein files. Think about that. Survivors can’t get a meeting but a GOP member of Congress gets the Situation Room.

That tells us everything about the Justice Department’s priorities under Bondi’s leadership.

Bondi once made accountability her brand. As Florida’s attorney general, she worked to clear a backlog of thousands of untested rape kits. She stood with survivors. She vigorously fought human trafficking. And built a political identity around it.

Then she came to Washington and began running interference for those who might be exposed by the Epstein files and thwarting survivors’ attempts for justice. Even Trump’s White House eventually soured on her handling of those files, with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles reportedly saying Bondi “whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,”according to Vanity Fair.

“First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.” Trump fired her in April amid growing frustration over her leadership and the department’s failure to follow through on its promises to release the files in a transparent manner.

The Epstein files problem didn’t leave with Bondi. Blanche, Bondi’s deputy, is the acting attorney general. Nothing else has changed. The same department. The same withheld files. The same survivors waiting. Changing the nameplate at Main Justice doesn’t change the obligation.

With a 427-1 vote, the House passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November, requiring the Department of Justice to release all unclassified Epstein files within thirty days. The Senate approved it unanimously. Trump finally got on board and agreed to sign it.

DOJ released some of the files. Then it stopped — and hid behind a legal fig leaf to justify it.

The DOJ is saying roughly three million documents — the witness interviews, the evidence gathered by the FBI, the files most likely to contain the real story — are shielded by prosecutorial privilege. At the Oversight Committee hearing Friday, Rep. Dave Min, D-Calif., wasn’t having it. “There’s a reason we don’t have the smoking guns, we don’t have the video evidence, we don’t have the witness interviews,” he said. “They’re claiming that’s all privileged. And that is a bunch of bull—t.”

He’s right. The Epstein Files Transparency Act and congressional subpoenas specifically apply to these types of documents. The privilege claim is a delay strategy, not a sound legal defense. The DOJ decided the public shouldn’t have access to some information in the Epstein files and then tried to find a legal justification.

That’s defiance of a law passed by an almost unanimous Congress. However, when Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., asked a federal judge to appoint a special master to force compliance, the judge ruled that enforcement was beyond his authority in a closed criminal case and pointed them back to Capitol Hill. He did say there were legitimate concerns, however, about whether the DOJ was faithfully complying with federal law.

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Because the court door is closed, Congress is the only path left for the survivors to get the transparency and accountability they deserve.

Rep. Wesley Bell, D-Mo., has already drawn the blueprint. His EPSTEIN Act would establish an independent, bipartisan commission — eight members evenly split between parties, selected by leadership in both chambers and entirely separate from DOJ — with the authority to review unredacted files and refer criminal findings to state attorneys general for prosecution. That referral authority matters. This Justice Department won’t police itself. The commission would do it for them. 

Critics will argue this proposal raises separation-of-powers concerns by moving Congress closer to functions traditionally reserved for the executive branch. But lawmakers like Bell are considering extraordinary measures because the ordinary ones have failed: Congress passed a disclosure law, the DOJ has not fully complied and the courts have declined to intervene. That leaves oversight, transparency and public accountability back on Capitol Hill.

The bill sits in the House Judiciary Committee, where the Republican majority may be hoping to bury it epin the hopes that no one notices.

But Democrats should make sure everyone notices.

They should force the vote. Make Republicans go on record. Do they support an independent review of the Epstein files or don’t they? Do they stand with the survivors or with Bondi and the new acting leadership of Trump’s Justice Department that won’t even give those survivors a meeting? 

Bondi tried to wash her hands of the Epstein files mess in a closed-door interview before the House Oversight Committee on Friday — not on camera and with Todd Blanche’s name ready for every hard question. Don’t be fooled. It was her job to be transparent. And she wasn’t.

Anthony Coley

Anthony Coley is a political analyst for MS NOW. He was director of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs in the Biden administration from February 2021 until January 2023. Before that, his previous roles included deputy assistant secretary in the Treasury Department’s Office of Public Affairs and communications director for U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.