Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday showed the sharp divide between the left and the right on how justice in the US is being carried out.
Democrats and Republicans repeatedly talked past one another throughout the hearing, pointing fingers across the aisle over who was to blame for weaponizing the Justice Department.
Democrats accused Bondi of allowing President Donald Trump to direct prosecutions of his political enemies, including last month’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. Republicans, meanwhile, blamed the Biden Justice Department of using special counsel Jack Smith to prosecute Trump and spy on Republicans, pointing to the release Monday of documents showing Smith’s investigation obtained call records through a court order of eight Senate Republicans.
Bondi approached Tuesdays’ hearing prepared to deflect Democratic questions on a number of topics, from the Comey prosecution and the release of the Epstein files to the deployment of National Guard troops in blue states. She also had a host of personal attacks at the ready to try to brush back her Democratic questioners.
Here are takeaways from Tuesday’s hearing:
Bondi’s strategy: Deflect and attack
Bondi fended off questions on the investigation into accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, National Guard deployments, and investigations into Trump’s political enemies, using quick-one liners to deflect and personal attacks to push back against Democrats.
As senators pushed her on Trump’s connections to Epstein, the attorney general repeatedly claimed that those same Democrats had connections to another alleged associate of Epstein’s, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
She also questioned why Democrats hadn’t raised concerns about the Epstein investigation before her term, at one point challenging senators by responding, “Did you ask Merrick Garland any of this over the last four years when he sat before you?”
And when Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin pushed Bondi on the legal rationale for sending National Guard troops to Durbin’s state against the governor’s wishes, the attorney general shot back: “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump.”
She attacked several other Democrats personally.
When Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal questioned Bondi over her connections to a law firm involved in a merger scrutinized by the Justice Department, Bondi went after Blumenthal for decade-old allegations he lied about military service in Vietnam.
“Senator Blumenthal, I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service,” Bondi said. “How dare you? I’m a career prosecutor. Don’t you ever challenge my integrity.”
In response to questions from Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii about the closing of an investigation into Trump’s border czar Tom Homan reportedly taking $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents last year, Bondi said that no credible evidence of wrongdoing was found and then shot back with a non-sequitur.
“You were also on video outside the White House protesting with a group … where ANTIFA members were. Does that mean you’re a member of ANTIFA?” Bondi said.
In less contentious exchanges, the attorney general responded to questions by criticizing Democrats for not voting to end the government shutdown.
“The personnel issue that I’m having right now is that all of my agents, all of my lawyers, are … working without a paycheck because your party voted to shut down the federal government,” Bondi said.
In one exchange during which Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse accused Emil Bove of prosecutorial misconduct during his brief stint as principal associate deputy attorney general, Bondi stopped him with a rejoinder: “To correct you for one moment, that would be the Honorable Judge Emil J. Bove III to you.”
Democrats pointed to numerous examples they say show Bondi has failed to keep the Justice Department independent from the whims and wishes of the president.
Bondi was pressed about a social media post Trump made directly urging Bondi in September to prosecute three of his political enemies, telling her, “we can’t delay any longer” and that not bringing criminal against several Democrats charges is “killing our reputation and credibility.”
Less than a week later, Comey was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, asked Bondi whether she considered the post “a directive to the Justice Department.”
Bondi replied, “Trump is the most transparent president in American history, and I don’t think he said anything that he hasn’t said for years.”
Blumenthal displayed a photo of Bondi having dinner at the White House with Trump the night before Comey was indicted. She disputed his suggestion it was a small dinner but would not engage on what she had discussed with the president.
“I am not going to discuss any conversations I have or have not had with the President of the United States,” Bondi said Tuesday.
Democrats also pressed Bondi on the firing of numerous DOJ officials, including attorneys fired for their work on January 6 cases or for refusing certain prosecutions of anti-Trump figures. She said she wouldn’t discuss personnel matters.
Several Republican senators pointed to the release of documents the night before Tuesday’s hearing that showed the phone records of eight Republican senators and a House lawmaker were obtained as part of the special counsel’s investigation into Trump and 2020 election interference.
Bondi called the disclosure a “betrayal of public trust.”
“They were playing politics with law enforcement powers and will go down as a historic betrayal of public trust,” Bondi said. “This is the kind of conduct that shatters the American people’s faith in our law enforcement system.”
That phone records of some lawmakers were seized in the probe and were made public in court documents as Smith’s investigation was ongoing. There is no indication that the Republican senators were targets of the probe.
While the phone records were obtained via court order, several Republican senators suggested the actions of the Biden Justice Department were criminal and urged Bondi to investigate.
GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee lamented what she described as a “lack of caring from my colleagues across the dais when it comes to how the DOJ under Biden was weaponized.”
As Republicans and Democrats took turns questioning Bondi, the accusations of politicized justice continued to be thrown back and forth across the aisle — with both sides accusing the other of a double standard.
“The double standard is clear, and the American people are waking up to the corruption and favoritism and the lawlessness at the DOJ,” Hirono said of the DOJ under Bondi.
“The double standard is crystal clear,” Bondi responded after Hirono’s time expired. “You didn’t complain for four years when President Trump was being targeted by Jack Smith, by the last Justice Department, but the American people spoke loud and clear when they overwhelmingly elected him. The two-tier system of justice is over.”
Republicans and Bondi defend Comey prosecution
Bondi and a former Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee defended the indictment of Comey during Tuesday’s hearing, one day before he’s set to be arraigned on charges that he allegedly lied to Congress in 2020 testimony.
Bondi declined to get into any specifics about the Comey charges, but she tried to defend it several times by suggesting the Alexandria, Virginia, grand jury that handed up the indictment was a liberal one.
“I am not going to discuss pending cases because Comey was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia by, I may point out, is one of the most liberal grand juries in the country,” Bondi said when Klobuchar asked about career prosecutors finding insufficient evidence for an indictment.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 during Comey’s testimony raised in the indictment, ticked through a litany of grievances related to Comey’s actions while FBI director and the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia.
Graham questioned Comey’s testimony that he did not know about a 2016 intelligence about an alleged “Clinton plan” to tie Trump to Russia during the 2016 campaign. (Former special counsel John Durham found that the emails cited in the intelligence appeared to be faked, according to an annex to his report released earlier this year.)
Comey’s response to Graham about that intelligence was included in the charges DOJ sought against Comey, but the grand jury rejected that count.
Graham went after Comey’s larger handling of the FBI’s Russia investigation in 2016 and 2017, ticking through his longstanding criticism of the Crossfire Hurricane probe.
“Why are we looking at Comey? Give me a break,” Graham said with exasperation. “Why are we looking at Comey? Because he ran an FBI and personally knew about exculpatory information and let it slide.”
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