Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are applying pressure to Attorney General Pam Bondi over her bungled rollout of government files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the late alleged sex trafficker whose list of high-profile associates included President Donald Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former President Bill Clinton.
Bondi’s highly anticipated rollout of revelatory Epstein documents landed as a dud, even among some conspiratorial right-wingers, when they failed to provide any new information. Bondi has since claimed to have uncovered another cache of documents in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and said the Justice Department would need to go through them to redact certain details for national security reasons and to protect victims.
Online, Democrats have accused Bondi of withholding documents and raised questions about whether she’s conspiring to use her promised document dump to protect Trump or his associates, even suggesting her recent decision to place a top Justice Department official on leave may be related to the Epstein case. Senate Judiciary Democrats’ X account drew attention to Bondi’s sidelining of Andrew Rohrbach, a prosecutor who worked on the federal cases against New York Mayor Eric Adams and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Pam Bondi just put the attorney who successfully prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell ON LEAVE,” the account posted on Monday. It quoted a thread from the previous week that highlighted Trump’s and Kennedy’s relationships with Epstein.
“WHAT’RE THEY HIDING?” the quoted thread asks.
In 2002, before Epstein had been charged with any crimes, Trump praised him as a “terrific guy” and told New York Magazine that “he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” In 2019, after Epstein faced charges, Trump told reporters that “I was not a fan” of Epstein’s and that “I had a falling out with him a long time ago.”
Kennedy has said that he accepted flights on Epstein’s plane on several occasions but that he “knew nothing” about Epstein and merely accepted the travel arrangements because his wife at the time knew Maxwell.
As soft as this resistance from Democrats may seem — launched via social media posts and not, apparently, in the halls of Congress — it does appear to be the most sustained effort by Democrats in any official capacity to bring attention to Trump and his associates’ ties to Epstein.
Which is noteworthy, given Democrats’ rather odd decision to cede the field on the topic to far-right influencers who might attempt to use the files to attack Democrats linked to Epstein, like the former president and the late New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. (A spokesman for Clinton said in 2019 that “President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York.”) For whatever reason, Democrats have reached a point where they don’t seem comfortable letting Bondi (or Trump’s Justice Department, more broadly) frame this story.
For the record, Trump — who as you may remember wished Maxwell well during her child sexual abuse trial — has sent mixed messages about the release of documents related to his former associate’s federal sex trafficking case. He hedged last year when asked whether the Epstein documents should be released, initially answering “yes” before telling Fox News, “I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”
