Pam Bondi Is a Piece of Work

And it’s clearer than ever that she sees her job as covering for and protecting criminals within the Trump regime.

Photo courtesy of the BBC

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi went before the Senate yesterday where she was supposed to provide testimony about critical Justice Department matters of which she has direct knowledge.

Instead, Bondi evaded answering the senators’ questions. And when pressed, she changed the subject and attacked the questioners’ integrity.

The New York Times described her demeanor as “cagey” and “combative.” For example, when Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) challenged Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to Chicago, Bondi sneered, “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump.”

She called Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) a “failed lawyer” and demanded he apologize to Donald Trump.

This performance may impress her boss and delight the MAGA base, but the general public saw someone evasive and disrespectful. And when that happens, whether in court or in the court of public opinion, they inevitably begin to wonder, 1) what is she hiding and 2) who is she protecting?

Let’s review some of the key lines of questioning that Bondi very much didn’t want to address and develop the backstory for each that led senators to demand more information. From there, the answers to those two questions become quite clear.

Trump’s name in the Epstein files

A very damning thing took place earlier this year inside the Justice Department with respect to the Epstein files. Jason Leopold of Bloomberg News reported back in March that “an army of FBI agents and FOIA analysts have been holed up in the bureau’s sprawling Central Records Complex in Virginia as they process thousands of pages of Jeffrey Epstein files.” Leopold further reported that “FBI employees received a directive to begin working uninterrupted on the Epstein records” and that the directive “was sent via text message to their personal devices, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

This review of documents, according to a letter sent from Sen. Durbin to Bondi, per information his office had received, was a herculean task involving as many as 1,000 FBI agents and other personnel. They pulled all-nighters while they combed through over 100,000 documents.

As the Wall Street Journal reported in July, the Justice Department then told Trump sometime in May that his name was in the Epstein files. And as Durbin noted to Bondi in his July letter, “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”

Leopold confirmed in August that Trump’s name had in fact been blacked out from the files before they were released in response to FOIA requests. “While reviewing the Epstein files, FBI personnel identified numerous references to Trump in the documents,” Leopold reported. Specifically, Trump’s name “was blacked out because he was a private citizen when the federal investigation of Epstein was launched in 2006.”

So when Sen. Durbin had an opportunity to question Bondi about the document review, he had a very specific and important question. Who actually gave the order to flag Trump’s name in the Epstein files? But Bondi stonewalled and refused to answer the question.

You can watch the entire clip here:

The question of who gave the instruction about flagging Trump’s name in the files goes to the heart of the White House effort to cover up his involvement with Epstein. Did Trump himself order it? If not Trump, was it Bondi acting on her own? Or FBI Director Kash Patel? And why did whoever made that call want each instance flagged? For review by someone else, perhaps by Trump himself?

Reviews of such importance don’t happen on their own. Someone wanted to know exactly how bad the files made Trump look. Occam’s razor says it was Trump himself, or at the very least someone very high up trying to protect him. The fact that Bondi would not answer this question means we are getting quite close to a key missing part of the puzzle.

And then there’s the alleged damning photos of Trump

Author Michael Wolff disclosed that Epstein had shown him photos of Trump together with half-naked young women sitting on his lap. Per reporting by The Daily Beast in October of 2024,

The pedophile financier had about half a dozen pictures which showed Trump by the pool with multiple young women, Wolff claimed on his podcast, Fire & Fury, Thursday. They were taken in the “late ’90s” at Epstein’s Palm Beach home, where he victimized dozens of underage girls along with his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, Wolff said.

Wolff alleged that they were in Epstein’s safe, which the FBI seized when they raided his homes in New York and Palm Beach in July 2019. The massive haul of evidence taken by the feds has never been made public—and while prosecutors disclosed after the raid that they had “hundreds of photos of girls and young women,” they have never offered any more details of them.

Trump is famous for suing anyone who even remotely suggests he was involved in sordid acts with Epstein, yet he has never sued Wolff. If the pictures exist, and the FBI has them, it would explain why the GOP is so bent on preventing their release and keeps trying to block the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Speaker Mike Johnson has even delayed the swearing in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was elected more than two weeks ago, in order to prevent the 218th vote on a discharge petition to put the bill to a House vote on the floor.

So when Bondi was asked by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) whether the FBI found the referenced photographs of Trump with half-naked young women in their search of the Epstein safe or property, or whether she’s seen any such thing, Bondi really went off the rails.

She accused Sen. Whitehouse of making “salacious remarks trying to slander President Trump” and then tried to change the subject to something completely unrelated.

Sen. Whitehouse ignored the dodge and asked again, and this time Bondi stared at Sen. Whitehouse slack-jawed, simply not answering the question.

Reporters and FOIA requesters take note. Bondi’s refusal to answer that direct question is quite the reveal. A simple “no” would have been easy if the photographs did not exist or if she had no knowledge of them. Her evasion suggests that they do in fact exist, as Wolff has claimed, that the FBI retrieved them, and that she has seen them. The public now deserves to see them, too.

Moreover, that Epstein may have kept the photos in his safe suggests that he knew how damaging they would be to Trump if ever made public. Was Epstein going to blackmail his former friend with them? Why keep them so secure?

Just how damning are they?

Bondi the jet-getter

By now the public is quite familiar with Trump’s “gift” from the nation of Qatar of a $400 million jet, which Trump is having retooled into a new Air Force One at significant cost to the public. What is less known is Pam Bondi’s role in how that transaction came to be.

It’s critical to note that Bondi used to be a foreign lobbyist for Qatar. And this was no small gig for her. As the Senate Judiciary Committee reported, “As a FARA-registered lobbyist, Bondi lobbied Congress on behalf of Qatar, earning $115,000 per month.”

Moreover, Bondi wasn’t transparent about her lobbying work when she submitted her paperwork to the Senate for confirmation as Attorney General. Wrote the committee,

Bondi did not list her current role as a lobbyist as a potential conflict of interest, nor any of the specific work she’s done for her clients that might implicate her role as the chief federal law enforcement officer.

Despite this conflict of interest, the Justice Department approved Trump’s $400 million “gift” jet from Qatar. As CNN reported back in May,

The Justice Department’s internal legal advisers cleared a memo signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi endorsing the legality of President Donald Trump accepting a 747-8 luxury jet from Qatar, a DOJ official said Wednesday.

The Office of Legal Counsel approved the memo before Bondi signed it and sent it to the White House, a Justice Department official told CNN. Bondi, who previously lobbied on behalf of the Qatari government, also consulted with career ethics officials, the official said, who determined there was no conflict that would require her recusal.

This process, however, felt highly secretive and shady. Indeed, the Freedom of the Press Foundation group, represented by American Oversight, had to sue even to gain release of that memo. And in May, Sen. Durbin wrote a letter to Bondi about the approval process behind this transaction.

“There are serious questions about whether you should have recused yourself from this matter,” Sen. Durbin wrote, adding that Bondi had committed to “consult with the career ethics officials within the Department” if matters involving Qatar arose.

But when Bondi was asked directly about this process at yesterday’s hearing, she again refused to provide any details, including why didn’t recuse herself and whether she in fact had consulted with career ethics officials, as one Justice Department official had claimed to the press. Instead she acted as if she didn’t understand the question, then deflected saying only that her “Office of Legal Counsel provides confidential advice to the President, to the White House, period.”

It seems very unlikely that “career ethics officials” would have allowed her to approve the transaction given her prior lobbying role with Qatar. Bondi knew she should have recused herself, and is now refusing to provide information about whom she supposedly consulted before making the decision not to.

Recently, Donald Trump issued an executive order in which he purported to provide security guarantees to the nation of Qatar resembling those afforded to our NATO allies. Was this a quid pro quo for the “gift’ of the jet? It sure seems like it.

Covering for Homan error

Border czar Tom Homan—who was once ubiquitous on news networks railing against immigrants and threatened ever more detentions and mass deportations—has been mostly absent from view of late. That’s because there’s reportedly a video recording of him in a parking lot accepting a paper bag of cash containing $50K from undercover FBI agents.

In any other administration, this would be the scandal of the century. In the Trump White House, it’s just another mess to clean and cover up.

Bondi is head of the Justice Department, of which the FBI is a part. When it comes to investigations and internal matters, the buck stops with her. And yet Bondi wouldn’t answer some very basic questions about that $50,000 in cash.

Specifically, Bondi wouldn’t say whether Homan kept that money or ever paid taxes on it. Here was a key exchange between Bondi and Sen. Whitehouse:

Bondi: Senator, as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently stated, the investigation of Mr. Homan was subjected to a full review by the FBI, agents and DOJ prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.

Whitehouse: And that was not my question. My question was, what became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI delivered, evidently in a paper bag, to Mr. Homan?

Bondi: Senator, I’d look at your facts.

Sen. Whitehouse: Are you saying they did not deliver $50,000 in cash to Mr. Homan?

Bondi: Senator, as recently stated, the investigation of Mr. Homan was subjected to a full review.

Sen. Whitehouse: …a different question.

Bondi: Five FBI agents, five Department of Justice prosecutors. They found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Sen. Whitehouse: That’s a different question. What became of the $50,000? Did the FBI get it back?

Bondi: Mr. Whitehouse, excuse me, Senator Whitehouse, you’re welcome to talk to the F.B.I.

Sen. Whitehouse: They report to you. Can’t you answer this question?

Bondi: Senator Whitehouse, you’re welcome to discuss this with Director Patel.

Sen. Whitehouse: Did Homan keep the $50,000?

Bondi: As Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently stated, the investigation of Mr. Homan…

Sen. Whitehouse: Okay, never mind, never mind. I can see I’m not going to get a straight answer from you to a very simple question.

Bondi then launched into an unrelated accusation that Sen. Whitehouse works with “dark money all the time.”

The Attorney General’s insistence on not providing any details about the $50,000, other than to fall back on a prepared response about the investigation having not found any credible evidence against him (wait, including that bag of money?), reeks of a cover up. The American public, with some exceptions, is not dumb enough to believe that someone can accept $50,000 in cash from undercover agents without there being some crime underway, committed right there on camera.

The attempt to cover this up now gives new life to this story and, like the Epstein matter, suggests there is something more there. Perhaps something much worse than that initial acceptance of cash.

Attorney General Bondi owes us not only answers but her resignation. And if she is now actively covering up for criminal wrongdoing, she should be one day be charged with obstruction and aiding and abetting Homan if and when the evidence ultimately reveals her involvement.

As Sen. Durbin said to Bondi after she once again refused to provide any information in response to his question, “Eventually you are going to have to answer for your conduct in this. You won’t do it today, but eventually you will.”