Democrats Seethe At Pam Bondi Over Epstein Spying, Childish Insults

WASHINGTON — Democrats are seething over revelations the Justice Department is tracking lawmakers’ searches of the Epstein files, with some saying Attorney General Pam Bondi should resign and others pushing to overhaul the way lawmakers are allowed to view the sensitive documents.

“We’re in the middle of a cover-up, and so we have to use the extremely embarrassing fact that they’ve been spying on us to come up with a completely different system for us to review these documents,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told HuffPost.

Even House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), one of President Donald Trump’s foremost defenders, told reporters Thursday he was looking into the matter and suggested the Justice Department had acted inappropriately.

“That would obviously be an important line that’s crossed, and obviously we can’t allow for that,” Johnson said.

The Justice Department set up a satellite office this week where lawmakers could review material the department had excluded from the public disclosure required by a law passed last year. The office includes four computers, and lawmakers said department officials logged them in and remained in the room while they browsed the material.

Still, the Justice Department did not tell lawmakers the administration would so closely track their behavior when viewing and searching the files, and only learned about it after news photographers caught Bondi looking at a document titled “Jayapal Pramila Search History” when the progressive representative from Washington state was questioning her during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday.

The document was included in a binder Bondi had in front of her while testifying, which Raskin labeled a “burn book,” and which mostly seemed to contain specific insults for her to lob at Democratic members of the committee. She called Raskin a “washed-up lawyer,” for instance, and accused him of not caring about a crime committed in his district by an undocumented immigrant.

The binder also apparently had lists of the specific Epstein files lawmakers had looked at. In Jayapal’s case, the list included files labeled “thank you for a fun night – your littlest girl was a little naughty” and “new Brazilian just arrived, sexy and cut, 19yo.”

Jayapal confirmed Thursday that Bondi’s paper showed the files she’d looked up. She told HuffPost that Bondi is not fit to remain attorney general following her “horrific” performance.

“She is supposed to be the people’s attorney general, the people’s lawyer, but she had an audience of one yesterday,” Jayapal said. “His name was Donald Trump. She is still acting like the personal attorney for Donald Trump, and coming in and simply insulting members of Congress.”

Bondi served as Trump’s personal attorney during his first impeachment trial in 2020 over his scheme to extort Ukraine into announcing a sham corruption investigation against then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Jayapal said she’d spoken to Johnson, who served alongside Bondi on Trump’s impeachment defense team, but declined to share details of the conversation.

Congress passed a law last fall requiring the Justice Department to put its files on Epstein in a searchable public database, with exceptions for material that would intrude on the privacy of his victims. The Department has withheld millions of documents in what Democrats and Republicans alike have said is a violation of the law.

Epstein killed himself in 2019 while facing charges for sex trafficking minors. He had socialized with President Donald Trump until the two had an apparent falling-out in the early 2000s. Trump’s past friendship with Epstein has fueled doubts that his administration will allow people to see all the files.

Searching the word “Trump” returned more than 4,700 results on the DOJ’s Epstein Library page on Thursday. Raskin has said that on the private server where lawmakers can view unredacted material, the president’s name is on more than a million files. He and others said they learned from the Justice Department’s cache that some of the public-facing files have been improperly redacted.

In addition to Congress passing a law requiring Epstein disclosures, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena for the material. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the committee’s top Democrat, told HuffPost that Bondi should resign and be held in contempt of Congress.

“We knew already that the DOJ is incredibly corrupt, and the spying on what we’re searching for, I think the question has to be asked: Can we trust anything that the DOJ is actually doing?” Garcia said.