Bondi was more interested in El Paso lasers than questions about Epstein cover-up
News and commentary for Floridians and other thoughtful Americans
“You’re running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Justice Department … You acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference, and jaded cruelty towards more than 1,000 victims raped, abused and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up.”
— Rep. Jamie Raskin to Attorney General Pam Bondi
While Attorney General Pam Bondi was melting down before Congress yesterday, stranded airline passengers in El Paso were wondering why their airport was closed.
Turns out, the Federal Aviation Administration shut the airport down because it was worried that lasers being fired into the skies around the border town might hit passenger jets.
Those lasers were being deployed against what was said to be a “swarm” of incoming drug cartel drones. Which prompted Bondi to tell members of the House Judiciary committee who were grilling her:
“The news is reporting that cartel drones are being shot down by our military. That’s what we all should care about right now: protecting America.”
It was one of many furious attempts by Florida’s former attorney general and Donald Trump’s minion at the Justice Department to deflect, distract, and in all ways avoid answering direct questions.
It turns out that the Pentagon has developed high-powered ground-based lasers that it does, indeed, intend to deploy to shoot down threats to American airspace. There was a meeting planned for next week to discuss how such a device could be safely deployed in El Paso.
But somebody got trigger-happy, evidently.
And El Paso authorities say drones flying around near the border are nothing new, and there is no evidence produced thus far of a “cartel drone incursion.”
It appears the Federal Aviation Administration, unclear on what was happening, ordered the airport closed for 10 days. That order was later rescinded. But not before hundreds of airline passengers were left stranded and confused.
Still, Bondi chose to use that as an example of the Trump Administration’s crime-fighting prowess. She also threw in a bizarre monologue about the Dow Jones Industrial Average and mugshots of assorted criminals from around the country to try to deflect from the topic of the day: The Epstein Files.
Her near-hysterical reactions to Democrats questioning her behavior and competence were so off-putting that even right-wing commentators are calling for her to resign.
Among them, conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on Twitter (currently known as X):
“When the Attorney General of the United States is asked why she has prosecuted no one related to Jeffrey Epstein and this is her answer, she should be fired or resign.”
The hearing lasted for more than four hours and consisted largely of Democrats laying out the case for how the Justice Department under Bondi has let down the American people, covered up the names of Epstein’s accomplices, and exposed the names of victims.
Bondi consistently refused to answer direct questions and accused Democrats of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Republicans had no serious questions for Bondi at all, to nobody’s surprise.
Perhaps the most excoriating indictment of Bondi came from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin.
I’m reprinting it in its entirety here:
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome, Attorney General Bondi.
“You’ve got the best lawyer’s job in America. Your mission is justice and your clients are the American people.
“But, to promote justice for the people, you must listen to the victims, like the women seated behind you. They’re some of the hundreds of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s global sex trafficking ring demanding the truth for America and accountability for the abusers who trafficked and raped them. You still haven’t met with these survivors.
“So with their permission, let me introduce to you the survivors and late survivors’ family members who are present today:
“Theresa Helm; Jess Michaels; Lara Blume McGee; Dani Bensky; Liz Stein; Marina Lacerda; Sky and Amanda Roberts, who are the family of the late Virginia Giuffre; Sharlene Lund; Rachel B.; and Lisa Phillips.
“Now, you’re not showing a lot of interest in the victims, Madam Attorney General.
“Whether it’s Epstein’s human trafficking ring or the homicidal governmental violence against citizens in Minneapolis, as Attorney General, you’re siding with the perpetrators and you’re ignoring the victims. That will be your legacy unless you act quickly to change course.
“You’re running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Justice Department. You’ve been ordered by a subpoena and by Congress to turn over six million documents, photographs and videos in the Epstein files but you’ve turned over only three million. You say you’re not turning over the other 3 million because they’re somehow duplicative. But we know that there are actual memos of victim statements in there. And you also took down the Department of Justice’s prosecution memo from 2019. So it’s clearly not all duplicative. But even if it were, why not release it, just release all the duplicative stuff.
“In the half you did produce, you redacted the names of abusers, enablers, accomplices and coconspirators, apparently to spare them embarrassment and disgrace, which is the exact opposite of what the law ordered you to do.
“Even worse, you shockingly failed to redact many of the victims’ names, which is what you were ordered to do by Congress. Some of the victims had come forward publicly, but many had not. Many had kept their torment private, even from family and friends. But you published their names, their identities, their images on thousands of pages for the world to see. So you ignored the law.
“And even with over 100,000 employees at your disposal, you acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference, and jaded cruelty towards more than 1,000 victims raped, abused and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up.
“Convicted sex trafficker and groomer Ghislaine Maxwell “opened the gates of hell” to Virginia Giuffre and hundreds of other victims, as Virginia recorded in her remarkable book Nobody’s Girl. But when Maxwell was subpoenaed to testify before Congress, you and Todd Blanche quickly moved her from a higher-security prison to a minimum-security camp in Texas where she’s enjoyed five-star treatment, including catered meals, private gym time, and access to a therapy puppy. All because Todd Blanche, who has utterly failed to investigate the monstrous crimes of Epstein and Maxwell’s co-conspirators, spent nine hours with Maxwell to satisfy himself she would have nothing untoward to say about Donald Trump, which is your only real interest in this whole matter.
“But abandoning victims and coddling perpetrators is what you do best. When the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the brutal killing in Minneapolis of Renée Good, a poet and 37-year-old mother of three, by Trump’s masked paramilitary ICE agents, you shut it down. You claim you’re investigating the cold-blooded murder of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the VA, but how can we trust the Administration when the President and Kristi Noem call Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and Stephen Miller called him a “would-be assassin”? Not only do you refuse to share evidence with the state and local investigators and prosecutors in Minnesota, but you blocked their access to the crime scene and the evidence.
“How are you seeking justice for Marimar Martinez, the Montessori school teacher in Chicago who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent who bragged about it over text; or the family of Keith Porter Jr., a father of two shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent in LA; or the family of Silverio Villegas González, shot and killed in Illinois minutes after dropping his children at school? There’s no sign of any movement at the Department of Justice. You even launched a criminal investigation into Renée Good’s grieving widow.
“But it’s even worse. You’ve turned the People’s Department of Justice into Trump’s instrument of revenge.
“Donald Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time. He tells you to go after James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, and Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve Board, and Members of the United States Congress including Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Chrissy Houlahan, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio and Maggie Goodlander to name just a few. And you snap to it. You replace real prosecutors with counterfeit stooges who robotically do the president’s bidding. Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice function and contamination of federal law enforcement.
“The good news is many serious lawyers at DOJ, including your very own political appointees—your own people—have refused your lawless orders.
“Danielle Sassoon, your original pick for Acting U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, resigned rather than follow your corrupt order to quash an indictment against Mayor Eric Adams as a political favor from Donald Trump. A Federalist Society member who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, U.S. Attorney Sassoon refused to participate in this blatantly corrupt scheme. Her top assistant, Hagan Scotten, an Iraq War veteran and two-time Bronze Star recipient who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and then-Judge Kavanaugh, promptly resigned too, writing to your office: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
“You and the President nominated Erik Siebert, a fifteen-year career prosecutor, to be your U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. But after five months investigating Letitia James and James Comey, Siebert found no evidence to justify criminal charges. So you forced him out and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s personal lawyer from the Mar-a-Lago documents case, who had zero prosecutorial experience and no qualifications. And then you were humiliated when a federal judge found that this corrupt appointment was blatantly unlawful and threw out Halligan’s indictments entirely. And grand juries of American citizens have repeatedly rejected your vendettas and baseless indictments brought by the hacks left at DOJ now, with two different grand juries in Virginia voting down indictments against Letitia James in a single week. Just yesterday, another grand jury shut down your vendetta factory by rejecting an indictment against the six Members of Congress who had reminded servicemembers that they have a duty to refuse illegal orders.
“You tried to get a grand jury to indict six Members of Congress who were veterans of our armed forces, on charges of seditious conspiracy, simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. I hope you will heed the wisdom and the constitutional patriotism of those grand jurors and not try it again by doubling down on that humiliation.
“As your best lawyers are sacked for having participated in the January 6 case or just flee for the exits now, your new lawyers keep lying in court. In dozens of cases, your lawyers have been excoriated for lying to federal courts. Chief Judge Boasberg, right here in the District of Columbia, suggested your DOJ presented “a fraud on the court.” Other judges found your DOJ’s statements to be “inexplicably misleading,” “patently incredible,” “totally inconsistent,” and “so disingenuous that the Court is left with little confidence that the [government] can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.”
“Now, as Ranking Member, I asked the Chairman to add a few extra rounds of questions today because we each have five hours of questions, not five minutes, but we’re stuck with five minutes. That’s clearly insufficient to give voice to America’s victims and survivors and demand answers about the corruption and cover-ups that have overtaken your Department.
“We have just one round, so we ask you politely but firmly, Madam Attorney General: please don’t waste one second of our precious time by evading our questions, changing the subject, randomly reciting statistics to eat up time, or engaging in personal attacks against Members of Congress. We saw your performance in the Senate and we aren’t going to accept that. This isn’t a game. In the Senate, you brought a burn book, a binder of smears, to attack Members personally for doing the people’s work of oversight. Please set the burn book aside and answer our questions. And when you hear us reclaim our time, that means it’s time for you to stop speaking. We only have five minutes, so when we reclaim our time, that means you stop. And if you don’t, we will ask the Chair to stop the clock and let you go on his time.
“The quality of justice in America depends on the character of our government. Please do your job and bring the Department of Justice back from the brink. The survivors seated behind you, and the American people watching everywhere, deserve a Department of Justice worthy of its name.”
For the record
Because I do think it is important to give credit where credit is due, it appears that the El Paso lasers did hit their target. Reports indicate it was a party balloon that had drifted across the Rio Grande.
J.C. Bruce is the founder of Tropic Press, a Florida online news service dedicated to sharing news and commentary relevant to Florida readers, whether it originates in the Sunshine State or elsewhere. Bruce is an award-winning former newspaper editor, journalist and author living in Florida, his native state.
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To be fair, there are reports that the lasers did, indeed, hit one of their targets. It was a party balloon that seems to have drifted across the Rio Grande.
Jaime Raskin is certainly no washed up lawyer but a hero!