Pam Bondi, Epstein, and a Day of Shame on Capitol Hill

As survivors waited to be acknowledged, Bondi dismissed their pain as going into “the gutter,” lashed out at lawmakers, and sidestepped basic questions about transparency in the Epstein files.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

Yesterday was a national embarrassment.

Attorney General Pam Bondi stood before Congress with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse behind her dressed in white, hands raised, waiting to be acknowledged. Instead of addressing them, she said she didn’t want to “get in the gutter.”

It was hard not to hear the implication.

For years, I’ve suspected that inside the White House, the stories of Epstein’s victims are treated less as testimony and more as toxic sludge — something to be managed, contained, disposed of daily. Bondi gave voice to that suspicion. When pressed about transparency and justice, she chose grievance over empathy.

The survivors remain hopeful. They still believe they might be called to testify before Congress. They still want to speak to the FBI. They still think someone in power might want vindication for them. Watching them cling to that hope is both admirable and heartbreaking.

What was especially jarring was Bondi’s pivot, coupling a question about child predation with talk of the Dow, as if market performance should soothe a nation grappling with sex trafficking. As if child exploitation is tolerable so long as the economy is up.

She lashed out at Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), calling him a failed politician for asking why the name of an Emirati billionaire businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem had been redacted in an email from Epstein that read, “I loved the torture video.” Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, redactions are meant to protect victims’ identifying information, not powerful men.

So why was his name hidden?

What else is being redacted? Who else is being protected?

It’s worth noting that bin Sulayem e-mailed Epstein that he was considering attending Trump’s first inauguration at the invitation of Tom Barrack, a close Trump ally and now U.S. Ambassador to Turkey. That fact alone doesn’t prove anything but it underscores why transparency matters.

Many of the survivors are Republicans, or at least they were when I met them in 2019 and were hopeful for justice. They believe this should be nonpartisan. As survivor Marijke Chartouni put it to me afterward, “To me it seemed that Attorney General Bondi came well prepared, but with a pair of pompoms and a red MAGA cheerleading outfit.” She saw what we saw, she was performing for an audience of once.

The night before the hearing, I rewatched Amy Poehler’s old spoof of Bondi on Saturday Night Live. The cold open was funny then. It felt less funny now. Especially when you hear Bondi called Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) a “washed-up, loser lawyer” on the record. It was so over the top, even Poehler might have thought it went too far.

At the hearing about the most consequential sex-trafficking case in modern American history, Bondi offered no clarity, no roadmap, no acknowledgment of harm, only venom.

And that, more than anything, is what made it an embarrassment.