Pam Bondi did the equivalent of "pleading the Fifth" on Tuesday when she refused to answer the question of Democratic senators on various topics ranging from Jeffrey Epstein to the indictment of James Comey.
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As Donald Trump’s top legal henchwoman, Attorney General Pam Bondi is enjoying a front row seat to what it looks like when a president is weaponizing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to go after his perceived adversaries.
Just last month, Trump effected the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress.
To make sure that doesn’t happen to her when the next Democrat in the White House decides to hold the most lawless administration in history to account, Bondi adopted a novel strategy at Tuesday’s farcical Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: she simply refused to answer the questions of Democratic senators.
Instead, she either didn’t say anything at all or responded to various inquiries by launching personal attacks against her questioners.
The result was one of the most embarrassing congressional hearings in recent memory – in part because of Bondi’s refusal to answer questions, and in part because Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) let her just rant and rave without reining her in.
As a result, the American people will have to wait to find out whether the attorney general spoke to Trump about the Comey indictment (which would be a huge scandal), whether DOJ went ahead with charging the former FBI director even after career prosecutors felt the evidence in the case was insufficient (which would be a huge scandal), and whether Border Czar Tom Homan kept the $50,000 undercover agents offered him as a bribe last year (which would be a huge scandal).
They also won’t get answers related to whether Bondi discussed Qatar’s bribe gift of a jet to Trump with ethics lawyers.
Or whether she is firing career prosecutors for their roles in the prosecution of January 6 insurrectionists.
Or who at DOJ gave the order to flag documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that mention the president.
Or whether she has seen the images of Trump with half-naked young women that Epstein had reportedly shown to other people.
Those last two aren’t as much scandals as they are expected developments.
At this point, it is extremely clear that this administration and congressional Republicans are doing all they can to keep the Epstein files out of the public’s view.
By the way, this isn’t even close to being an exhaustive list.
Instead of answers, Democratic senators mostly got a slew of insults from Bondi, who seemed to come prepared with opposition research on all of them.
However, while the attorney general may have avoided perjuring herself by responding to questions with non-sequiturs, there is one thing she said under oath that is demonstrably false.
When asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) about whether she had conversations with the head of her former law firm, who was lobbying DOJ in support of a corporate merger, Bondi went off.
“Don’t you ever challenge my integrity,” she bristled. “Do not question my ability to be fair and impartial as attorney general.”
However, it is becoming increasingly clear that Bondi has no integrity.
Of course, those who have been following her career have known this for a long time… certainly at least since, as Florida’s attorney general, she nixed a probe into “Trump University,” a company run by her current boss that was mired in fraud allegations and had to shut down, after receiving a $25,000 donation from the Trump Foundation for her political action committee.
While falsely claiming to have integrity won’t rise to the level of perjury, Bondi’s entire testimony, as well as that of every other Trump administration official who appears before Congress, deserves great scrutiny.