Bondi clashes with Democrats amid furore over handling of Epstein files

US attorney general Pam Bondi has launched into a wide-ranging defence of Donald Trump, repeatedly shouting at Democrats during a hearing on the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Besieged by questions over Epstein and accusations of a weaponised Justice Department, Ms Bondi attacked her Democratic opponents and praised the US president over the performance of the stock market.

“You sit here and you attack the president and I’m not going to have it,” Ms Bondi told lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee. “I am not going to put up with it.”

With victims of Epstein sitting behind her in the hearing room, Ms Bondi defended the department’s handling of the files related to the well-connected financier that have dogged her tenure.

She accused Democrats of using the Epstein files to distract from Mr Trump’s successes when it was Republicans who initiated the furore over the files and Ms Bondi herself fanned the flames by distributing binders to conservative influencers at the White House last year.

In her opening remarks, she told Epstein victims to come forward to law enforcement with any information about their abuse and said she was “deeply sorry” for what they had suffered. She told the survivors that “any accusation of criminal wrongdoing will be taken seriously and investigated”.

But she refused to turn and face the Epstein victims in the audience and apologise for what Mr Trump’s Justice Department has “put them through” and accused Democrat Pramila Jayapal of “theatrics.”

The hearing quickly devolved into a partisan brawl, with Ms Bondi repeatedly mocking and lobbing insults at Democrats while insisting she was not “going to get in the gutter” with them.

In one particularly fiery exchange, Jamie Raskin of Maryland accused Ms Bondi of refusing to answer his questions, prompting the attorney general to call the top Democrat on the committee a “washed-up loser lawyer — not even a lawyer”.

Her appearance before the House Judiciary Committee comes a year into her tumultuous tenure that has amplified concerns that the Justice Department is using its law enforcement powers to target political foes of the president.

Just a day earlier, the department had sought to secure charges against Democratic lawmakers who produced a video urging military service members not to follow “illegal orders”. But in an extraordinary rebuke of prosecutors, a grand jury in Washington refused to return an indictment.

Turning aside criticism that the Justice Department under her watch has become politicised, Ms Bondi touted the department’s role in working to reduce violent crime and said she was determined to restore the department to its core missions after what she described as “years of bloated bureaucracy and political weaponisation”.

Democrats condemned Ms Bondi over haphazard redactions in the Epstein files that exposed intimate details about victims and also included nude photographs.

A review by The Associated Press and other news organizations has found countless examples of sloppy, inconsistent or non-existent redactions that have revealed sensitive private information.

“You’re siding with the perpetrators and you’re ignoring the victims,” Mr Raskin told Ms Bondi in his opening statement. “That will be your legacy unless you act quickly to change the course. You’re running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Department of Justice.”

Republican Thomas Massie, a Kentucky lawmaker who broke with his party to advance the legislation that forced the released of the Epstein files, also took Ms Bondi to task for the release of victims’ personal information, telling her: “Literally the worst thing you could do to survivors, you did.”

She told Mr Massie that he was only focused on the files because Mr Trump is mentioned in them, calling him a “hypocrite” with “Trump-derangement syndrome”.

Department officials have defended their handling of the files, saying they took pains to protect survivors, but that errors were inevitable given the volume of the materials and the speed at which the department had to release them.

Ms Bondi told lawmakers that the Justice Department took down files when they were made aware that they included victims’ information and that staff had tried to do “our very best in the time frame allotted by the legislation” mandating the release of the files.

Ms Bondi has struggled to move past the backlash over her handling of the Epstein files since handing out binders to a group of social media influencers at the White House in February 2025. The binders included no new revelations about Epstein, leading to even more calls from Mr Trump’s base for the files to be released.