Former Attorney General Pam Bondi supplied a sturdy protection of the Justice Department’s handling of the discharge of the Jeffrey Epstein files as she arrived on Capitol Hill Friday morning for a long-sought interview with the GOP-led House Oversight Committee.
“To the best of my knowledge, the Department produced everything required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” Bondi stated in a press release launched simply forward of her closed-door interview with the panel. Bondi argued DOJ “demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to transparency” in its launch of the case paperwork in latest months.
Roughly two months after her firing and simply days after making public her cancer diagnosis, Bondi is talking to Hill lawmakers concerning the division’s handling of the Epstein probe underneath her watch — a significant supply of competition inside Donald Trump’s White House throughout her tenure.
Rep. James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, confused to reporters Friday morning that his committee is “taking this investigation seriously” because it holds the thirteenth interview in its probe into the late convicted intercourse offender.
“We want to get the truth to the American people, we wanted to try to provide justice for the survivors,” he instructed reporters.
But forward of the sitdown with Bondi, Comer’s Democratic counterpart on the panel, Rep. Robert Garcia, lashed out at Republicans for not requiring the previous lawyer normal to talk on digicam or to take a proper oath earlier than talking to the panel.
While Bondi’s interview can be transcribed and made public, Garcia stated it “should have been under oath, and it should be videotaped.”
Just forward of Bondi’s look, a gaggle of Epstein survivors spoke to reporters concerning the significance of her interview — and what they noticed as a transparent want for extra data.
Marina Lacerda, one of these survivors, stated she believes Bondi is aware of particulars concerning the investigation that the general public doesn’t. “We all hope that today Pam Bondi will be as clear as possible and hopefully bring accountability to the table,” she stated.
Some 2.5 million paperwork within the Justice Department’s investigative information associated to the late convicted intercourse offender haven’t been publicly launched and plenty of of the three.5 million pages which have been revealed are closely redacted, prompting questions on what’s being stored from the general public.
During her time as the highest US legislation enforcement official, Bondi confronted criticism from each events over her lack of transparency on the Epstein investigation.
She’s additionally confronted scrutiny over redaction errors that, in some circumstances, uncovered personal private details about the survivors within the paperwork.
Another survivor who spoke to reporters Friday, Liz Stein, stated she desires Bondi to reply for these redaction errors — and to reveal if anybody has been held accountable for revealing survivor names “while protecting the names of perpetrators.”
“I would certainly hope that as a career attorney and as the former head of the Department of Justice for the United States of America that she will have some kind of moral reckoning with her conscience and remember why she was put in the job she was in, and what her responsibilities in that job are to the American people and not necessarily any particular administration,” Stein stated.
In March, the oversight panel, with a number of GOP lawmakers becoming a member of Democrats, voted to subpoena Bondi. Looking to spice up members’ confidence in how the investigation was being dealt with, she then voluntarily appeared for an off-the-cuff assembly with lawmakers — however Democrats walked out of that meeting as a result of she wouldn’t decide to testifying underneath oath.
Bondi was then set to seem for a sworn deposition in April, however she was fired from her position as lawyer normal earlier than the scheduled sit-down – prompting the division to argue against her scheduled look. Furious Democrats threatened to carry her in contempt of Congress. She is now showing voluntarily earlier than the committee.
Bondi has been on the middle of the Trump administration’s political disaster on Epstein from the beginning.
Shortly after taking workplace, Bondi appeared to aspect with the various MAGA loyalists pursuing full transparency of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein information. She famously instructed Fox News that Epstein’s long-rumored shopper listing was “sitting on my desk right now.”
But she later walked again her remarks and her division supplied no new particulars on Epstein, infuriating the MAGA base. That lack of transparency helped gasoline a GOP revolt inside Congress, led by Rep. Thomas Massie and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which in the end pressured Trump and Republican leaders to fast-track DOJ’s launch of a sprawling net of Epstein information.
Still, some Republicans and plenty of Democrats have insisted the DOJ has slow-walked the discharge — or withheld different particulars altogether.