Attorney General Pam Bondi placed on an astonishingly contemptuous efficiency as she confronted questions from lawmakers over her management of the Justice Department and dealing with of recordsdata regarding intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein in a Wednesday listening to.
One congressman likened her exhibiting to one of many nice villains of literature.
Seated earlier than the House Judiciary Committee, Bondi responded to questions on the Epstein recordsdata with shouting, insults, sarcasm and eye rolls.
Similar to her final trip earlier than Congress in October, President Donald Trump’s high regulation enforcement officer pivoted to political and private assaults when pressed by Democrats in regards to the Epstein scandal and different controversies engulfing her division, together with the Trump administration’s unsuccessful effort to indict Democratic lawmakers who urged energetic responsibility troops to defy “illegal orders.”
She tried to divert consideration towards a handful of crimes dedicated by undocumented immigrants in Democratic panel members’ districts, as an alternative of answering their questions on different subjects.
During one astonishing second, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) requested Epstein survivors within the listening to room to face and lift their palms if they’d been unable to satisfy with officers from Bondi’s division. Every one in all them did.
In the alternate that adopted, Bondi refused to apologize to them, and slammed Jayapal’s ways.
“I’m not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics,” Bondi boomed.
In one other extraordinary flashpoint, the lawyer common went backwards and forwards with Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) as he tried to ask what number of of Epstein’s co-conspirators her division had been indicted.
“Here we go with these theatrics,” Bondi snapped, prompting Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the highest Democrat on the committee, to intervene and inform her to not filibuster.
“You don’t tell me anything,” Bondi fired again, accusing Raskin of being a “washed-up lawyer.”
The confrontational tone was set when Raskin unloaded on Bondi throughout his opening assertion.
Raskin accused Bondi of “running a massive Epstein cover-up” by not totally releasing all of the recordsdata, and claimed she has acted with “staggering incompetence, cold indifference and jaded cruelty.”
More broadly, he mentioned Bondi had “turned the people’s Department of Justice into Trump’s instrument of revenge.”
“Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time,” he mentioned.
Raskin famous Bondi had purchased a “binder of smears” to assault senators at her final congressional listening to, and urged the Trump official to “set the burn book aside and answer our questions.”
The plea fell on deaf ears, even when sparring with Republicans. Bondi referred to as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) “a failed politician” and “hypocrite” with “Trump derangement syndrome” when he tried to carry her accountable for the Justice Department’s mishandling of redactions within the Epstein recordsdata.
During a break within the listening to, Massie instructed HuffPost he didn’t assume she was doing very properly.
“She’s got Massie Derangement Syndrome,” Massie mentioned. “It’s her thing now. Over at the administration, it’s eating them up.”
Bondi defended the DOJ’s dealing with of the Epstein recordsdata by raving in regards to the inventory market in one other eye-popping second.
In response to criticism from Nadler over the Epstein debacle, she pointed to how the Dow Jones Industrial Average had simply surpassed a 50,000-point milestone, because of Trump.
“He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history, and none of them, none of them asked [Joe Biden’s Attorney General] Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein. How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump — the Dow. The Dow right now is over — the Dow is over 50,000,” she mentioned.
Raskin laughed from the dais.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing. You’re a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin,” Bondi mentioned. “The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7000, and the Nasdaq smashing records, Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”
At the second of Bondi’s assertion, the Dow had really dipped again under 50,000.
Bondi’s Trump loyalism follows experiences the president is turning into more and more pissed off together with his lawyer common, grousing to aides that she’s failing to hold out his agenda.
During one other frank alternate over the Epstein probe, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) accused Bondi of appearing out a “Jekyll & Hyde kind of routine,” a reference to the Robert Louis Stevenson story a couple of scientist who drinks a potion and then leads a nefarious double life.
“You’re nice to the Republicans and you turn like Hyde on the Democrats,” Johnson defined to her.
Later within the listening to, Bondi went so far as to purpose a baseless antisemitism cost at Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) because the Democrat pressed the lawyer common on hyperlinks between Trump administration officers and Epstein.
“I want the record to reflect that, you know, with this antisemitic culture right now, she voted against a resolution condemning ‘from the river to the sea,’” Bondi mentioned, earlier than Balint grabbed the mic and raised her voice.
“Oh! Oh, do you want to go there, attorney general? Do you want to go there? Are you serious, talking about antisemitism to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust? Really?!”
Balint then left the room.
After the listening to ended, Raskin criticized Bondi’s “spectacularly disrespectful and amateur performance.”
“I can’t believe that the attorney general of the United States of America would appear before hundreds of millions of Americans this way and then have a book of insults that she’s ready to lob at members of Congress,” he instructed reporters. “My God, we’ve got to get back to the America that we had before. They dragged us down into the mud.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pam-bondi-house-judiciary-committee-hearing_n_698cb866e4b080ae0a8148d8