By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, ERIC TUCKER and STEPHEN GROVES Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Pam Bondi launched into a wide-ranging, passionate defense of President Donald Trump, repeatedly shouting at Democrats during a combative hearing in which she postured herself as the Republican’s chief protector and tried to turn the page from persistent criticism of the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Besieged by questions over Epstein and accusations of a weaponized Justice Department, Bondi aggressively pivoted in an extraordinary speech in which she mocked her Democratic questioners, praised Trump over the performance of the stock market and openly aligned herself as in sync with a president whom she painted as a victim of past impeachments and investigations.
“You sit here and you attack the president and I’m not going to have it,” 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, Bondi forcefully defended the department’s handling of the files related to the well-connected financier that have dogged her tenure. And she accused Democrats of using the Epstein files to distract from Trump’s successes when it was Republicans who initiated the furor over the files and Bondi herself fanned the flames by distributing binders to conservative influencers at the White House last year.
In her opening remarks, Bondi told Epstein victims to come forward to law enforcement with any information and about their abuse and said she “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 when pressed by Rep. Pramila Jayapal to turn and face the Epstein victims in the audience and apologize for what Trump’s Justice Department has “put them through” and accused the Democrat of “theatrics.”
The hearing quickly devolved into a partisan brawl, with 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, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland accused 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.”
Bondi’s 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 politicized, 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 weaponization.”
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan praised Bondi for undoing actions under President Joe Biden’s Justice Department that Republicans say unfairly targeted conservatives — including Trump, who was charged in two criminal cases that were abandoned after his 2024 election victory.
“What a difference a year makes,” Jordan said. “Under Attorney General Bondi, the DOJ has returned to its core missions — upholding the rule of law, going after the bad guys and keeping Americans safe.”
Democrats, meanwhile, excoriated 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 nonexistent redactions that have revealed sensitive private information.
“You’re siding with the perpetrators and you’re ignoring the victims,” Raskin told Bondi in his opening statement. “That will be your legacy unless you act quickly to change the course. You’re running a massive Epstein coverup right out of the Department of Justice.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky lawmaker who broke with his party to advance the legislation that forced the released of the Epstein files, also took Bondi to task for the release of victims’ personal information, telling her: “Literally the worst thing you could do to survivors, you did.”
Bondi told Massie that he was only focused on the files because 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.
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.
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 Trump’s base for the files to be released.
After raising the expectations of conservatives with promises of transparency, the Justice Department said in July that it had concluded a review and determined that no Epstein “client list” existed and there was no reason to make public additional files. That set off a furor that prompted Congress to pass the legislation demanding that the Justice Department release the files.
The acknowledgment that the well-connected Epstein did not have a list of clients to whom underage girls were trafficked represented a public walk-back of a theory that the Trump administration had helped promote when Bondi suggested in a Fox News interview last year that it was sitting on her desk for review. Bondi later said she was referring to the Epstein files in total, not a specific client list.