She yelled, she flailed, she taunted. She accused everyone else in the room of rampant theatrics. In the end, even the MAGA faithful on social media struggled to excuse what they had witnessed. In the defining moment of her career so far, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s testimony in front of the House judiciary committee couldn’t have gone much worse if she had tried.

From the moment the hearing began on Wednesday morning, Bondi appeared rattled as she repeatedly attempted to pivot away from the very subject that required her presence in front of dozens of bipartisan legislators. Though she was there to answer a myriad of questions regarding her department’s handling of the Epstein files, Bondi attempted again and again to shift scrutiny from the DOJ to the Dow Jones, a strategy that courted criticism and only raised more questions about President Donald Trump’s administration.

“The Dow is over 50,000 right now!” Bondi cried out amid stern questioning from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401Ks and retirement savings are booming. That's what we should be talking about. We should be talking about making Americans safe… What does the Dow have to do with anything? That’s what they just asked? Are you kidding?”

Though Bondi was brought before Congress to testify on the DOJ’s botched release of the Epstein Files and her team’s investigation (or lack thereof) into the co-conspirators listed in the heavily redacted documents, the former Florida attorney general continually gravitated back toward the stock market, as though rising indices could substitute for accountability. In an outburst that defined the day and mimicked the territorial defiance of Trump himself, Bondi berated Raskin. 

“You don’t tell me anything!” Bondi yelled after the Maryland congressman requested that Bondi answer his line of questions instead of eating up the clock with long-winded statements about the success of the stock market. “You’re a washed-up loser lawyer.”

When a dozen Epstein survivors present in the room were asked to stand and raise their hands if Bondi’s DOJ had failed to speak with them, every single woman (and the brother of deceased victim Virginia Giuffre) raised their hands. Bondi responded by angrily accusing Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of performative politics before stating that she wouldn’t “get in the gutter” with the congresswoman from Seattle.

And that was all before Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who, together with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), has led the push to get the Epstein files released in full, took his opportunity to cross-examine Bondi. It went exactly as you might imagine, with Bondi trading barbs with Massie, a Republican who has dared to make good on Trump’s own campaign promise to shed light on “the Epstein class.”

When Massie accused the Justice Department of redacting the names of several Epstein co-conspirators, an omission that violates the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump in November, Bondi straightened her posture and called Massie “a failed politician.” When Massie noted that former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner was among the co-conspirators initially redacted by the DOJ, Bondi simply scoffed and accused Massie of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

But Massie wasn’t finished. Though Bondi has claimed redactions in the Epstein Files were made to protect survivors and victims of Epstein, Massie highlighted an email from the victims’ lawyers that was sent to the DOJ. “It was a list of names not to be released,” said Massie. “And what did the DOJ do with this email? They released it. Literally the worst thing you could do to the survivors, you did."

During a break for lunch, Massie told the assembled press that Bondi’s performance had failed to provide the sort of transparency many Americans expected when they voted for Trump 2.0. “She didn’t answer anything,” Massie said. “She came here ready to talk about the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq, which seems kinda crazy to me." Massie also accused FBI Director Kash Patel of making false statements under oath, a claim that was further clarified through video provided by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). 

Following a heated exchange between the California congressman and Bondi during which the attorney general admitted that Trump’s name appears “countless times” in the Epstein files, Swalwell then played a video from a September 2025 House Judiciary hearing in which Patel insisted Trump’s name did not appear even 100 times in the Files. Though roughly only 3 million of the 6 million total Files have been released by the DOJ, Trump’s name reportedly appears thousands of times in documents that remain heavily redacted.

Another name directly tied to the Trump administration that appeared a dozen times in the Epstein files is that of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who, in an October 2025 interview with the New York Post, said he vowed to “never be in the room with that disgusting person again” after privately visiting Epstein with his wife in 2005. But, according to the files, Lutnick, who was Epstein’s next-door neighbor in Manhattan, engaged in business dealings with Epstein as late as 2012. 

Democratic Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) pointedly asked Bondi about Lutnick after the commerce secretary admitted to visiting Epstein’s island during a Tuesday Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. Bondi characterized the questioning from Balint as shameful, despite Lutnick’s own admission that he and his family made a lunch visit to Epstein on a private boat and on the sex offender’s island. “I am not asking trick questions,” replied Balint. “The American people deserve to know. These are senior Trump officials."

The hearing didn’t get any easier for Bondi, who then accused Balint, who is Jewish, of antisemitism because Balint voted against a resolution condemning the pro-Palestine slogan “from the river to the sea.” 

Balint was stunned. “You want to go there?” asked the congresswoman. “You’re talking to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust.”

It was the sort of moment that typified Bondi’s performance on Capitol Hill Wednesday. In a hearing meant to provide transparency and accountability to those harmed by a serial sex offender connected to America’s most powerful, Bondi instead turned oversight into spectacle. As if the hearing couldn’t have been made worse, a photograph of Bondi’s binder page revealed a page labeled “Jayapal-Pramila search history.” Now the Justice Department is under heavy pressure to clarify whether they are indeed cataloguing the search history of lawmakers like the Washington congresswoman who reviewed unredacted Epstein files earlier in the week. 

When asked about her experience viewing the unredacted Epstein files, Jayapal said DOJ employees sat behind her and watched her every search. “They had logins that had our names, they logged us into the computers,” she told reporters. “So clearly they intended to look at our search history even when they invited us in.” When questioned about the situation on Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson, a true-blue Trump loyalist, admitted it wouldn’t be appropriate for anyone, including DOJ staff, to track the search history of members of Congress. 

If the allegations are true, it wouldn’t only be Democratic members of Congress whose search history was allegedly tracked by DOJ officials, but also a number of MAGA Republicans, including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who both called for Epstein handler Ghislaine Maxwell to receive harsher prison conditions after viewing the unredacted Files. 

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For an administration desperate to move past Epstein, the Bondi hearing simply courted more controversy than it relieved. Fox News, long a defender of all things Trump, dedicated an entire segment of its Wednesday evening coverage to the outrage garnered by Bondi’s testimony. “Bondi comes off like a shrieking Karen,” said the mononymous Fox News commentator Kennedy. “She seemed very, very unpersuasive. She needs to tone it down.”

But toning it down is the exact opposite of how the chief movers in Trump’s world operate. 

The issue is no longer whether Bondi had a bad day on Capitol Hill. It’s whether the Justice Department under her leadership understands the difference between loyalty and law enforcement. The Bondi hearing was supposed to quiet the Epstein controversy. Instead, it widened it by pulling in cabinet officials, members of Congress from both parties, and even conservative media. If this was the administration’s attempt at damage control, it failed in the most spectacular fashion.