As each Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee interrogated Pam Bondi Wednesday over the delayed and messy rollout of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the attorney general would flip through the pages of a thick binder and fire back with accusations of her own: about the member accepting contributions from a shady donor, or their voting record, or their alleged failure to acknowledge crime in their district.
She dismissed ranking member and Harvard-trained lawyer Jamie Raskin as a “washed-up loser lawyer,” adding, “You’re not even a lawyer.” She accused Rep. Pramila Jayapal of bringing the proceedings “into the gutter” for pressing her on Epstein, and demanded Rep. Jerrold Nadler apologize for leading the first impeachment of Donald Trump. She told Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, “You don’t get anything regarding public safety. Nothing.”
“Thank you for the insult,” Scanlon responded matter-of-factly.
Bondi’s critique of Rep. Becca Balint for voting in 2023 against a GOP-sponsored resolution condemning antisemitic speech on college campuses drew a sharp response from the Vermont Democrat.
“Oh! Oh! Oh! Do you want to go there, Attorney General?” an apoplectic Balint shot back. “Are you serious, talking about antisemitism to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust? Really? Really?”
In one sense, Wednesday’s hearing—replete with shouted accusations, finger-wagging, and loud insults while a cadre of Epstein victims sat in the room—felt like the typical mawkish amateur-hour theater that’s become the cringy staple of Capitol Hill hearings, with one slight twist: The witness was often more aggressive than the lawmakers who tried to shame her.
But there are lessons to draw here as well: the utter disdain the administration has for congressional Democrats (and renegade Republican Rep. Thomas Massie) even on an issue that continues to bedevil the president; the alternate worlds Democratic and Republican lawmakers continue to occupy on almost every front; and the reality that bipartisan governance actually might fade even further from view (if that’s even possible) assuming the Democrats win back the House in November.
On that note, be sure to add Bondi to the list of Cabinet officials (Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) who could face impeachment next year.
No doubt Trump, who values unapologetic aides and has pressured the the Justice Department to go after political enemies, cheered his chief prosecutor’s performance.
But it also called to mind other congressional hearings forever etched in America’s conscience: the moment in 1954 when Boston lawyer Joseph Welch called Sen. Joseph McCarthy's “sense of decency” into question, effectively ending his anti-communism crusade; the Watergate hearings in 1973 that laid out the case against President Nixon; or the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987 that exposed the Reagan administration's efforts to fund Nicaraguan contras by selling arms to Iran.
This was not that.
Wednesday seemed more like the discovery of yet another subterranean circle in the Dante’s Inferno of partisan hearings conducted mainly for campaign sound bites or to unleash pent-up frustrations in a public venue. Think of the 2015 Benghazi hearing featuring Hillary Clinton, Rep. Katie Porter admonishing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in 2020 for not knowing the price of a postcard stamp, or the numerous Supreme Court confirmation sessions in recent decades that have become grievance forums.
And who could forget the passionate exchange during a 2002 Senate hearing between George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd over who grew up poorer.
"I started my life in a house without water or electricity,” O’Neill said, appearing to fight back tears. “So I don't cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch."
Bondi’s demeanor was also a striking contrast to that of former special prosecutor Jack Smith during his understated appearance before the same committee last month. Smith followed decorum as he calmly laid out his reasoning for seeking indictments of Trump over the handling of classified documents.
After more than five hours on Wednesday, GOP Rep. Michael Baumgartner pulled the curtain back a little about what he had just experienced.
“Being a freshman on this committee, you always get a bit surprised, I guess—even in my first year—how theatrical days like this can be,” he told the weary attorney general. “But I think you’ve performed well today.”
