Pam Bondi's Circus Court
The Attorney General of the United States did herself no favors with her smug, defensive, contemptuous behavior in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
I don’t usually write about up-to-the-minute events here, choosing instead to give myself a bit of time to reflect and analyze before commenting. But today’s Congressional fiasco in the House Judiciary Committee was beyond any normal boundaries, so I’m choosing to break one of my own boundaries and post a few immediate thoughts.
Pam Bondi, the top law enforcement official in the nation, sat in front of a Congressional Committee with a literal book full of insults for her questioners. (This is not the first time she has done this, but merely a repeat tactic she used during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.) She repeatedly referred to that “burn book” multiple times because apparently she couldn’t even remember all the insults and accusations she had planned to hurl.
And hurl she did. She was combative, she was defensive, she was rude, and she was overtly hostile toward anyone who dared to question her. If this had been testimony in a court of law, she would have been held in contempt multiple times.
As someone who was a prosecutor, she knows this. But she still insisted on interrupting the members of Congress and giving them orders, telling them to allow her to waste their allotted time with rambling tangents that had nothing to do with the questions they asked. Those Congresspersons are there to represent the people in their districts and to provide oversight to ensure that the members of the Executive Branch are operating within the law. But this administration has been consistently operating as if it is above the law; Bondi is merely the most recent visible example.
In addition to disparaging and interrupting her questioners, she spent much of her time focusing on two subjects: the supposed failures of the Biden administration and the many supposed virtues and successes of the Trump administration. In a bizarre tangent, she even decided to quote the current numbers for the DJIA, the S&P500, and the Nasdaq.
I haven’t seen a word count yet, but I’d be willing to bet that she used more of her time sucking up to Trump than she did even mentioning Jeffrey Epstein or any of the survivors of his international pedophile ring.
When asked about failed redactions and failure to produce all of the files related to Epstein, she repeatedly tried to worm her way out of it by saying that the DOJ had (finally) released over 3,000,000 pages from the files. What she failed to acknowledge is that that number is less than half of the total number of pages.
Can you imagine any decent judge in any courtroom accepting that half compliance with a law is sufficient? (Well, perhaps a Trump-appointed judge would allow that deflection.)
Bondi finally consented to this hearing after more than a year in office, despite the many outstanding questions that have gone unanswered by her department. But, despite the long wait, the hearing was fruitless. But worse than its lack of substance, it was downright shocking and cruel to the Epstein survivors, who have already faced decades of cruelty and inaction.
Bondi proved unequivocally that she has no basic human decency. How much would it have taken for her to stand up when asked, turn around, face those survivors, and simply say “I’m deeply sorry and, as Attorney General, I will do everything in my power to see that justice is done”? But she couldn’t. She is simply incapable of doing something like that.
The overwhelming irony in her failure to do so is that she could have walked away from this hearing with that kind of response being the headline of the day, even if she never intended to follow through on such a promise. Instead, she chose to debase herself further in service to the convicted felon and sex offender in the Oval Office. Consequently, those headlines are all likely to be about her horrific, unprofessional behavior in front of the committee.
As a result, she merely cemented her reputation as being an overly devoted Trump sycophant who will say or do anything to remain in (or return to) his good graces.
I had two thoughts after watching most of the multiple hours of the hearing. The first was that I couldn’t ever remember feeling such a level of disgust for a public official (with the notable exception being her boss). The second was, if I, as a mere observer, was feeling that level of disgust, what must the Epstein survivors be feeling?
Pam Bondi heads the Department of Justice. My wish is that she herself will face actual justice soon.