The Hearing Room Attorney General Pam Bondi Testifies Before House Committee, Part 1
Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on Trump-era Epstein file mishandling, where critics allege 3M documents were improperly released, exposing victims’ identities while redacting abusers like Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayam. Survivors demand accountability, citing trauma from unredacted photos and emails, while Congress accuses Bondi of shielding Epstein’s associates—including Prince Andrew—despite clear evidence under the Federal Victims Trafficking Protection Act. Bondi denies wrongdoing, citing procedural rules, but faces demands to resign after claims she obstructed investigations, including a limo driver’s suspicious death linked to Trump-Epstein ties. Meanwhile, House debates ATF stun gun bans and ICE policies amid Minnesota shootings, exposing tensions between federal enforcement and sanctuary city protections. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Main
jamie raskin
rep/d11:11
jim jordan
rep/r16:15
pam bondi
admin26:23
z
zoe lofgren
rep/d05:02
Appearances
andy biggs
rep/r04:03
bill clinton
d00:31
d
darrell issa
rep/r04:43
eric swalwell
rep/d04:11
hank johnson
rep/d03:18
jasmine crockett
rep/d00:36
j
jerry nadler
rep/d04:36
l
lance gooden
rep/r01:06
pramila jayapal
rep/d04:45
s
scott fitzgerald
rep/r01:22
s
steve cohen
d03:46
t
ted lieu
rep/d03:57
t
tom tiffany
rep/r03:37
Clips
barack obama
d00:27
bernie sanders
sen/d00:08
hillary clinton
d00:04
kash patel
admin00:14
nancy pelosi
rep/d00:08
?
Voice
Speaker
Time
Text
Denver Justice Center Releases00:11:00
unidentified
With live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the U.S. Congress, White House events, the courts, campaigns, and more from the world of politics, all at your fingertips.
Catch the latest episodes of Washington Journal.
Find scheduling information for C-SPAN's TV and radio networks, plus a variety of compelling podcasts.
The C-SPAN Now app is available at the Apple Store and Google Play.
Download it for free today.
c-span democracy unfiltered america marks 250 years and c-span is there to commemorate every moment From the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future, we bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sights, and spirit that make up America.
Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can.
America 250, over a year of historic moments.
C-SPAN, official media partner of America 250.
Attorney General Pam Bondi testified on oversight of the Justice Department as part of a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.
Here, she responds to several questions about the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files.
to today's hearing on oversight of the Department OF Justice.
The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Tiffany, to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.
unidentified
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
The chairs now recognize 18 cities, 11 states, excuse me, three counties, and the District of Columbia are sanctuary jurisdictions, accounting for 31% of the population in this country.
31% of the American people, almost one-third of the American people, live in a city, county, or state where the left-wing leadership tells local law enforcement not to work with federal law enforcement.
Now, what does that mean in practice?
Let's look at Abraham Gonzalez, who on September 20th, 2023, was arrested by Border Patrol for illegally entering the United States.
And of course, the Biden administration released him into the country.
Five months later, February 26, 2024, Mr. Gonzalez is charged with assault.
Two weeks later, March 11th, 2024, he's charged with felony, motor vehicle theft, stole a car.
And on March 20th, 2024, nine days later, he's arrested by the Denver Police and placed in the Denver Justice Center.
Six days later, March 22nd, 2024, ICE sends a detainer notice to the Denver Justice Center saying this.
If you're going to release Mr. Gonzalez, can you give us a heads up?
Can you let us know maybe 48 hours before you're going to release this guy so we can come apprehend him there at the jail?
And remember, a detainer is a final order of removal from a court where this individual or this individual has committed some removable offense.
But on February 28th, 2025, Abraham Gonzalez is released to the streets.
In fact, we can put that up.
I think you can see this.
Released, we got the form from the Denver Justice Center.
What kind of inmate was Mr. Gonzalez for those 345 days that he was in the Denver Justice Center?
We have that too.
Violent to the staff, keep separate.
So this guy was so bad, you had to keep him away from other inmates.
He had already assaulted some staff member.
But Denver released this guy to the streets instead of turning him over to ICE agents who would have come to the jail and arrested him there.
And of course, we all know what happens.
When the officers did apprehend Mr. Gonzalez out on the street, he assaulted one of the officers.
This is what happens when you have a sanctuary jurisdiction.
Right now in Minnesota, there are 1,360 detainer notices for violent offenders.
Governor Walls and others have released 470 criminal illegal aliens back to the streets.
In New York State, it's 7,000.
Nationwide, it's over 17,000 that we know of.
Where a detainer was filed since President Trump's been in office, over 17,000 times a detainer was filed, and those individuals were released to the streets instead of turned over to federal law enforcement.
17,864 times illegals who've been charged with the crime have been released, released to the streets, and thereby jeopardizing the safety of the public, the safety of law enforcement, and of course the migrant themselves.
And frankly, helping create the environment that results in the tragic deaths like we saw with Ms. Good and Mr. Predty.
A few years ago, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said this in a response to the State of the Union address.
She said, the divide in America today is normal versus crazy.
And it's true.
Because it's crazy not to have a border, which is what we had under the previous administration.
It's crazy to abolish ICE.
And it's crazy to release bad guys who are here illegally to the streets when with one phone call, federal law enforcement will come to the jail and pick them up.
The mindset that says it's okay to release these guys is the same left-wing mindset that thinks it's okay to weaponize government against your political opponents.
And that is exactly what we had in the previous Justice Department.
The Biden-Harris Department of Justice called parents domestic terrorists.
The Biden-Harris Justice Department used FBI SWAT teams to arrest pro-life advocates.
The Biden-Harris DOJ targeted traditional Catholics.
The Biden-Harris DOJ pressured social media companies to censor Americans, and the Biden-Harris Justice Department launched not one, but two investigations into President Trump, spending over $35 million to try to bring down their political opponent.
To further this effort, they sought the phone records of over a dozen Republican members of Congress.
Even the Democrats said this was wrong.
They got bank records for scores of White House officials.
They even paid at least one confidential human source, $20,000, for information on President Trump.
And of course, while doing all this, they couldn't tell us who planted the pipe bombs, who leaked the Dobbs opinion, and who put cocaine in the White House.
But thank goodness the American people saw through it all.
Americans were tired of being targeted for their beliefs, tired of the law affair, tired of the rampant crime throughout this country, and that's why they overwhelmingly elected President Trump.
And what a difference a year makes.
What a difference a year makes.
Under Attorney General Bondi, the DOJ has returned to its core missions, upholding the rule of law, going after the bad guys, and keeping Americans safe.
The Trump Justice Department has restored the rule of law.
Murders are down nationwide by 20 percent, and D.C. violent crime is down by 28 percent.
The federal surge in D.C. resulted in 8,000 arrests, the seizure of 800 illegal guns, and the recovery of 16 missing kids.
The Trump Justice Department apprehended a suspect in the pipe bomb investigation, and they've arrested six of the FBI's top 10 most wanted fugitives in just one year.
Of course, they arrested narco-terrorist Nicholas Maduro, and they seize a record number of drugs flowing into this country.
Trump Justice Department put an end to targeting Americans for their beliefs.
Attorney General Bondi rescinded Attorney General Garland's anti-parent memorandum.
Department justice ended the practices of using the FACE Act to target pro-life Americans.
They've refused to tolerate attacks on places of worship and investigations of traditional Catholics that we saw in the previous administration on her first day.
Attorney General Bondi disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force that was pressuring social media companies to censor Americans.
And the Trump Justice Department has ended lawfare.
Under Attorney General Bondi, along with Director Patel, they've worked to expose the political nature of Ardick Frost and the Jack Smith investigations.
They've turned over hundreds of pages of documents to Congress, and that's why we know, for example, that Mr. Smith paid at least $20,000 to some confidential human source.
That's why we know that Jack Smith knew it was unconstitutional to seek to toll records from members.
But since the litigation risk was low, and because members would never find out about the subpoena until years later, they charged ahead and violated the Constitution.
The Trump Justice Department has changed DOJ policy to require prosecutors to tell judges if NDOs relate to members of the separate and equal branch of government, the Congress.
And to top it all off, the Trump Justice Department opened an investigation into the conspiracy behind the Russia collusion hoax.
The Justice Department has put common sense ahead of politics.
They sued to keep boys out of girls' sports.
They secured deals with universities to stop race-based admissions and anti-Semitic practices.
And after discovering rampant fraud in Minnesota, the Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General Bondi, has established a new national fraud division.
In fact, I met with Colin McDonald, who will head that division last week.
I think he's going to do a great job.
There's a lot of work to be done in that area, but I want to thank the Attorney General for her great work in the first year on the job, and I want to thank you for being here.
With that, I would yield to the ranking member for an opening statement.
Those are just some of the hundreds of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's global sex trafficking ring who are demanding that the truth be told and are demanding 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.
There's Teresa Helm, there's Jess Michaels, Laura Bloom McGee, Danny Bensky, Liz Stein, Marina Lacerda, Skye and Amanda Roberts, who are the family of the late Virginia Druffray, Charlene Rouchard, 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 Department of Justice.
You've been ordered by subpoena and by Congress to turn over 6 million documents, photographs, and videos in the Epstein files, but you've turned over only 3 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 co-conspirators, 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 Glene Maxwell opened the gates of hell to Virginia Jufrey and hundreds of other victims, as Virginia recorded in her remarkable book, Nobody's Girl.
But when Maxwell was subpoenaed to come 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's utterly failed to investigate the monstrous crimes of Epstein and Maxwell's co-conspirators, spent nine hours with Maxwell and satisfied himself that she would have nothing untoward to say about Donald Trump, which is your only real interest in the matter based on institutional performance.
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 Renee Goode, 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 Predi, an ICU nurse at the VA.
But how can we trust the administration when the president and Christy Noam called Predi 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, you have blocked their access to the crime scene and the evidence.
How are you seeking justice for Mari Marmartinez, the Montessori school teacher in Chicago who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent who bragged about it on text?
Or the family of Keith Porter, a father of two, shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent in LA.
Or the family of Silverio Villeas Gonzalez, shot and killed in Illinois minutes after he dropped his kids off at school.
There's no sign of any movement at the Department of Justice.
You even launched a criminal investigation into Renee Good's grieving widow.
How sick is that?
But it's even worse.
You've turned the People's Department of Justice into Trump's instrument of revenge.
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 Congress like Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Alyssa Slotkin, Chrissy Houlihan, Jason Crowe, Chris DeLuzio, and Maggie Goodlander, to name 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 some of your own original employees, have refused your lawless orders.
Danielle Sassoon, your original pick for acting U.S. Attorney 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 Scalia, U.S. Attorney Sassoon refused to participate in this blatantly corrupt scheme.
Her top assistant, Hagen Scotton, an Iraqi war vet and two-time Bronze Star recipient who clerked for Chief Justice Roberts, and then Judge Kavanaugh, promptly resigned too, writing to your office, quote, 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 Eric Siebert, a 15-year career prosecutor, to be your U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
But after five months of investigating Letitia James and James Comey, he found no evidence to justify criminal charges.
So you forced him out.
You 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.
And just yesterday, another grand jury shut down your vendetta factory by rejecting indictments against the six members of Congress who had spoken out to remind all service members that they have a duty to refuse illegal orders.
You tried to get a grand jury to indict six members of Congress who are 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 6th case or just flee for the exits now, your new lawyers keep lying in court.
In dozens of cases, they've been excoriated for lying to federal judges.
Chief Judge Bosberg right here in D.C. suggested your Department of Justice perpetrated a fraud on the court.
Other judges found your statements to be, quote, 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 ask 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 to demand answers about all the corruption and cover-ups that we see at DOJ right now.
We've got just one round, so we ask you politely but firmly, Madam Attorney General, please do not waste one second of our precious time by evading questions, by changing the subject, or engaging in personal attacks against members of Congress.
We saw your performance in the Senate, and we're not going to accept that.
This isn't a game.
In the Senate, you brought something with you called 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.
Without objection, all of the opening statements will be included in the record.
We will now introduce today's witness.
The Honorable Pamela J. Bondi has served as the Attorney General of the United States since February 5th, 2025.
She previously served in the office of the White House Counsel, two terms as the Florida Attorney General, and spent more than 18 years as a prosecutor.
We welcome our witness and thank her for appearing today.
We will begin by swearing you in.
Would you please rise and raise your right hand?
Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the testimony you're about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information, and beliefs?
Thank you, Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Raskin, and distinguished members of this committee.
Thank you for hosting me here today.
I'm grateful for the opportunity to answer your questions, highlight the work of our department, and discuss the most important topic of all, keeping the American people safe.
A little over a year ago, I was sworn into office as 87th Attorney General of the United States.
I came into office with the goal of refocusing the Department of Justice on its core mission after years of bloated bureaucracy and political weaponization.
The Department of Justice's core mission is to fight violent crime, protect the American people, and defend the rule of law above all else.
While our work is never done, we have made tremendous progress to make America safe again.
In 2025, we saw the lowest murder rate in 125 years.
That's nothing short of historic.
If you compare 25 to 24, here's what you'll find.
The murder rate is down 21 percent, robbery down 23 percent, carjacking down 43 percent, gun assault down 22 percent.
Ag assault, burglary could go on and on.
Crime is declining.
This did not happen by accident.
The numbers tell an important yet straightforward story.
President Trump has given us the resources, the support, and the leadership to protect the American people.
President Trump's policies have saved lives.
I cannot think of a policy outcome more important than protecting the lives of American citizens.
Can you?
This trend has been especially clear in Washington, D.C. and in Memphis.
These are two iconic American cities that spent years in the grip of horrific violent crime.
The Department of Justice surged law enforcement resources and the results came quickly.
Crime plummeted in both cities.
And I want to make one point loud and clear.
We achieved those results by working with Democratic mayors.
Public safety does not have a party registration.
When your constituents call 911, they don't ask for political views of the responding officer.
They ask for help.
I have federal agents in each and every one of your districts.
They're here to help, and I am here to help.
Many cities and states have worked with us and taken advantage of our federal support.
Some have not.
Meanwhile, a few elected officials have declared that they are, quote, at war with the federal government and encouraged widespread obstruction of law enforcement.
This has resulted in avoidable clashes on the streets, as you've all seen.
We've seen rioters storming a Christian church.
Citizens and law enforcement officers have both been endangered by reckless rhetoric.
We have made dozens of arrests in and around Minneapolis so far, and many of them could have been avoided by simple compliance with federal law.
Of course, our efforts reach beyond our urban centers.
We are striking crucial blows against terrorist organizations such as MS-13, TDA, the Sinaloa Cartel, and Antifa.
And as we sit here, I think you've seen the news this morning, 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.
As we seek to dismantle these drug trafficking networks that poison Americans, in 2025, our DEA agents seized more than 47 million fentanyl pills and more than 9,800 total kilos of fentanyl.
That represents 369 million potentially deadly doses that can kill Americans.
Meanwhile, our attorneys are fighting for President Trump's agenda in courtrooms across this country.
We fought through a non-stop flood of bad faith temporary restraining orders from liberal activist judges across this country.
America has never seen this level of coordinated judicial opposition towards a presidential administration.
It is not only an unlawful attack on the executive branch's authority, but a serious attack on the democratic process.
In spite of this unprecedented judicial activism, we've attained 24 favorable rulings at the U.S. Supreme Court, their emergency docket, and even more to come.
We've done so while ending the weaponization of the prior administration by dropping FASAC prosecutions, exposing the Arctic Frost scandal via congressional disclosure, thank you, Chairman, and restoring one tier of justice in this country.
To address the Epstein files, more than 500 attorneys and reviewers spent thousands of hours painstakingly reviewing millions of pages to comply with Congress's law.
We've released more than 3 million pages, including 180,000 images, all to the public, while doing our very best in the timeframe allotted by the legislation to protect victims.
And if you brought us a victim's name that was inadvertently released, we immediately redacted it.
All members of Congress, as you know, are invited to visit DOJ to see for yourselves.
I want to take a moment to acknowledge the Epstein survivors who are here today.
I'm a career prosecutor, and despite what the ranking member said, I have spent my entire career fighting for victims, and I will continue to do so.
I am deeply sorry for what any victim, any victim has been through, especially as a result of that monster.
If you have any information to share with law enforcement about anyone who has hurt you or abused you, the FBI is waiting to hear from you.
I want you to know that any accusations of criminal wrongdoing will be taken seriously and investigated.
The Department of Justice is committed to holding criminals accountable to the fullest extent of the law.
In 2025, the FBI arrested over 1,700 child predators, a 10% increase from 2024.
We also located 2,700 victims of child exploitation and shut down 3.8 million dark web pedophile accounts.
3.8 million.
So please, if you have information to share that needs to be investigated, contact the FBI.
Today, I look forward to discussing further our shared obligation to protect the American people, uphold the rule of law, and keep this nation safe.
Madam General, thank you for your extensive remarks, particularly on your continued investigation of those responsible over the years in the Epstein debacle.
Obviously, you have an amazingly full docket between civil rights, between criminal, between so-called white-collar crime, and doing so, as the chairman said, at a time in which both you and the president are under attack and our ICE agents and FBI and others are under attack when they try to enforce law.
I personally want to apologize for those who would embolden, support, or even stand with those lawbreakers that sit on this and other daises here in Congress.
My job generally is to talk about patents and trademarks as the chairman of that subcommittee.
I'll forego that today because one of my other jobs is the creation and maintenance of Article III judges.
And I work with the Chief Justice on that, and we're trying to expand the court.
But currently, there are only 677 district court judges.
They have very full dockets as well.
But you create a tremendous amount of judges, particularly immigration judges.
You do so in order to save the court that, but adjudicate, as is requirement, each of those people who claim a right to be here in the United States.
And that has been going on under Republican and Democratic administrations for years.
What is unique about the Trump administration this time is that you and President Trump have managed to reduce the backlog of people seeking that for the first time in decades.
You are getting ahead of that tremendous backlog that caused, for better or worse, the release of millions of people with little pieces of paper saying, come back later when we call you, and often to no avail when you call.
So I want to congratulate you on that, because it's an accomplishment you might not take credit for and the other side would never give you credit for.
But I hope you can continue to do that and do more.
And I say so for a reason, because much of this hearing will be about Minneapolis and other places in which the backlog of criminal aliens, including in my home state of California, people who have hurt other people, people who have victimized their communities, is extensive.
And although the overall number through adjudication may be going on, because of places like my home state, California, you are unable to apprehend people that my sheriffs want apprehended.
They desperately want to cooperate and they are prohibited by law.
It is this committee's opinion on this side of the aisle that, in fact, you should be given the ability to demand that participation and that the release of a known criminal not be considered to be acceptable just because a state or city has declared itself a sanctuary.
I want you to opine on just one thing that I think has been misunderstood.
As I said earlier, you create and maintain those judges that adjudicate these cases.
You also support so many that in fact have to make Decisions as judges.
Knowing that this limitation of so few Article III judges are there, please educate those who seem to miss the point that Article I judges, including bankruptcy judges, including immigration judges, including lots of people with the title appropriately judge, do in fact issue documents that look like, act like, and are normally accepted as warrants, as subpoenas,
as demands for state officials to stand aside and allow the production of either an individual or documents, because I think people are missing the point that these ICE retainers and detainers and so on, they act like they're nothing when, in fact, in the ordinary course, Madam General, you do in fact have Article I judges constantly putting those out and they are respected normally.
We are joined in this room by some of the thousands of survivors from Jeffrey Epstein's horrific sex trafficking ring.
They have shown such incredible courage in speaking out, in demanding accountability to bring the predators and pedophiles to justice.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required your Department of Justice to disclose the perpetrators connected with Epstein's criminal activities and to redact the information of survivors to protect their identities.
Let me show you what actually happened.
First, in violation of the law, your department has shown a pattern of redacting the names of powerful predators.
Here behind me is one example of an email from Epstein to a man whose name was redacted.
The email reads, quote, where are you?
Are you okay?
I loved the torture video.
Only after members of Congress demanded that we see the unredacted files did the world learn the name of this individual, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayam, the chairman and CEO of a company that had financial ties to President Trump's business and personal ties to Trump's advisor, Steve Bannon.
Second, the survivors were not similarly protected, also in violation of the law.
Here is another email titled Epstein Victim List.
We have blurred the names of the survivors for their protection, but your Department of Justice initially released this list of 32 survivors' names with only one name redacted, along with numerous files that disclose not only the names, the emails, and the addresses of survivors, but also nude photographs and even the identities of Jane Does,
who had been protected for decades until your department released their names.
Survivors are now telling us that their families are finding out for the first time that they were trafficked by Epstein.
In their words, quote, this release does not provide closure.
It feels like a deliberate attempt to intimidate survivors, punish those who came forward, and reinforce the same culture of secrecy that allowed Epstein's crimes to continue for decades.
To the survivors in the room, if you are willing, please stand.
And if you are willing, please raise your hands if you have still not been able to meet with this Department of Justice.
Please know for the record that every single survivor has raised their hand.
Attorney General Bondi, you apologized to the survivors in your opening statement for what they went through at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein.
Will you turn to them now and apologize for what your Department of Justice has put them through with the absolutely unacceptable release of the Epstein files and their information?
Attorney General Bondi, no, I'm going to reclaim my time because I asked you a specific question that I would like to answer, which is, will you turn to the survivors?
This is not about anybody that came before you.
It is about you taking responsibility for your Department of Justice and the harm that it has done to the survivors who are standing right behind you and are waiting for you to turn to them and apologize for what your Department of Justice has done.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Attorney General Bondi, for being here today.
In 2022, Lafarge, which is a French cement company, pled guilty in U.S. federal court to participating in a criminal conspiracy with ISIS.
That conspiracy contributed to the deaths of U.S. service members fighting in Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve.
As part of the plea agreement, Lafarge was required to pay more than $775 million into DOJ's asset forfeiture fund.
In February 2025, my colleagues and I sent you a letter urging the Department to review the petitions for remission submitted by the families of those fallen service members, including several of my constituents.
The previous administration ignored these victims and our requests and left their petitions unresolved.
My question for you on this particular issue is if you're willing to work to ensure those families that their petitions will be removed, it will be reviewed and brought to a resolution.
And now let's go to something that is also pressing that I've been working on for years, and this is the FISA Section 702 and Arctic Frost.
In January 2025, you testified before the U.S. Senate and agreed with Senator DeLee that, quote, anytime an American citizen's private communications are intercepted or stored, whether through incidental collection or otherwise, those communications should not be searched without some showing of probable cause, close quote.
And during the most recent FISA reauthorization, I offered an amendment to establish a clear warrant requirement for searches of Americans' data while preserving every publicly cited operational exception, including emergencies, defensive queries, cybersecurity threats.
And my intent was to ensure the Department of Justice could continue to keep Americans safe while also ending warrantless searches of U.S. persons' data.
Are there any additional circumstances or exceptions that you believe must be included to ensure DOJ can continue to operate effectively while still protecting American citizens' data and privacy?
Yeah, Congressman, we are committed to working with Congress to uncover weaponization and other misconduct by Jack Smith, by others, Arctic Frost, everything that happened under the past administration.
And we are committed to working with you on that.
And we are working with Chairman Jordan, with the House Intel, with all of my fellow cabinet members on resolving that issue.
And I'm glad you brought up Arctic Frost, because Section 702 was used in the Arctic Frost investigation.
It was.
And information derived was used by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
And my question has always been, and no one's been able to answer this, is what was the legal predicate for using a foreign intelligence authority in the Arctic Frost investigation?
Have you been able to ascertain any legal predicate?
And you probably can't answer this one either, but I really want to know if Section 702 queries related to that matter involved members of Congress, which we know at some level it did, congressional staff, which we know at some level did.
We've heard that journalists or other U.S. persons not suspecting of acting as foreign agents were also caught up in that.
Can you answer that question and say whether queries did cover all those groups I just identified?
It is a very active pending investigation within my office.
However, I believe many members of Congress have stated that their phones were part of Arctic frost.
We are well aware of that, and we are taking this very seriously, and this is a very active investigation.
And I would keep going and say if any member of the Democrat Party, if any of them, if that had happened to them, we would take that just as serious as we do.
And they should be jumping up and down screaming, supporting you and what you want to do, because this should be a bipartisan issue.
And, you know, I'll just leave with these last couple of questions, which I'm sure fall into the same investigation privilege.
But that's this.
How many such queries were actually conducted overall?
This is outside Arduck Frost in the prior year by the FBI or other intelligence community.
And particularly, we really need to know what were the legal standards applied.
Did they use probable cause?
Did they use reasonable, articulable suspicion?
Or did they have no individualized suspicion and just were gathering up information?
And that's beyond the investigation with regard to Arctic Frost.
I don't expect you to have that information today, but if you can help get that information so we can understand the extensive nature of this continued misuse of 702, it would be very particularly helpful.
I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record El Paso airspace reopened after FAA quickly rescinds 10-day flights restriction.
This was published by the Texas Tribune on February 11, 2026, and it says it was because of an impasse with the DOD over the use of unused military aircraft and not triggered by Mexican cartel drones.
Mr. Chairman, I want to begin by acknowledging the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's horrific abuse who are in the room with us today.
I want to thank all of you for your bravery in speaking out.
I want to say that you and the other survivors of these heinous crimes deserve better from this Department of Justice.
In particular, it is shocking that the Department did not redact the names of Epstein's victims, but it did redact the names of their abusers.
I don't know whether this was done out of incompetence or whether it was deliberate and malicious, but either way, it is completely unacceptable.
Even more troubling, the DOJ has failed to bring any of these perpetrators to justice.
Instead, it has engaged in a relentless pursuit of Donald Trump's perceived enemies.
I want to focus on just one example.
The Attorney General of my home state of New York, Tish James.
This DOJ has been hell-bent on securing an indictment against Ms. James for something, anything, simply because she held Donald Trump's companies accountable for years of financial fraud.
And indeed, the department manufactured an investigation against her for alleged, quote, mortgage fraud.
With the U.S. Attorney leading the investigation, Eric Siebert, a Trump appointee, refused to bring charges against Ms. James because there was simply no evidence.
Unfortunately, a prosecutor who refuses to do Trump's bidding has no place in this DOJ, so Mr. Siebert was forced out.
Trump could not contain his fury, fury that he expressed to you in a social media post addressed to you by name.
I'm sure you've seen it.
Quote, I fired him and there is a great case he wrote to you about Mr. Siebert.
Then we moved down.
We can't delay any longer.
It's killing our reputation and credibility.
They impeached me twice and indicted me five times.
Over nothing, justice must be served now.
And obviously, you followed that order.
Lindsay Halligan, Trump's former defense lawyer who had never prosecuted a case in her life, was installed to replace Mr. Siebert, and it was clear that part of her mandate was to go after Ms. James.
Halligan immediately sought an indictment, which a court dismissed because Halligan was illegally put into the row.
But your department was undeterred.
And not once, but twice, it tried to indict Attorney General James in separate courts.
Both grand juries rejected you and refused to indict her.
It is practically unheard of for a grand jury to refuse an indictment.
In 2016, it happened in just six cases out of over 150,000 offenses.
And you had it happened twice in the same week in two different courts.
And now there are reports you are continuing to investigate her.
The amount of resources that have gone into targeting Attorney General James, months of investigations, multiple failed indictments, is astounding.
Since your own prosecutors told you that there is not enough evidence to support a conviction, it is clear that you are going after her simply because she held President Trump accountable and he wants to punish her.
And she is just one name on a long list of Trump political enemies that DOJ is reportedly targeting.
From Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve to James Comey, numerous Democratic members of Congress, John Brennan, Jack Smith, Democratic officials of Minnesota, Chris Krebs, Miles Taylors, and more.
And those are just the ones we know about.
In contrast to these politically motivated investigations, grasping it is something they can charge their enemies with, we now have concrete evidence of disgusting criminality revealed in the Epstein files.
So I really have just one question for you.
How many of Epstein's co-conspirators have you indicted?
The answer to my question: how many of Epstein's co-conspirators has she indicted?
Is zero.
You have been the Attorney General for a whole year, and your DOJ fired the lead prosecutor of this case, sat on evidence this entire time, and claimed falsely last July that there were no more leads.
It took an act of Congress for you to finally release part of the Epstein files, and when you did, you included personal information about the victims while protecting the names of abusers.
I think that Democrats, in fact, should be apologizing to the Epstein victims for doing nothing during the four years that they were running the government.
We did not hear about this, and it took you and President Trump to finally provide transparency and give answers to the American people.
And I want to thank you for that.
I want to thank you also for standing up for truth today and for fighting back against the theatrics and the time waste that you will endure over the next hour or two.
I want to apologize on behalf of my colleagues on the left.
They're not all that bad, but they've got to put on a show.
And I'm sorry that you have to go through that.
And I would like to yield the last, I'd say 40, even 40 is 80 seconds.
The clock says 40, but I've got 80 seconds since I was so rudely interrupted.
I would note that Mr. Nadler's question has not yet been answered, but I want to start by asking that out of respect for the American public and the Epstein survivors, some of whom, of course, are here today, that we can have a transparent conversation and get the public the answers they deserve.
I want to briefly direct your attention to two documents I'm hoping we will put up on the screen.
In the first, an individual emails Jeffrey Epstein asking whether a woman identified as M was pro or civilian, and Epstein responds that she was a civilian, Russian, and fun.
In the second email, Epstein writes to Steve Tish about a Ukrainian girl, noting that she was, quote, a little freaked out by the age difference and stating that he would try to convince her not to return to Ukraine.
He then instructs Mr. Tisch to call him, adding, I don't like records of these conversations.
So I'd like to ask a straightforward question that really is either a yes or no answer.
Do these emails constitute credible evidence, not proof, but credible evidence warning further investigation into whether Steve Tish was involved in Epstein's criminal conduct?
Director Patel testified in this committee room that there was no credible information indicating that Epstein trafficked victims to anyone else.
And glancing at the documents, that's proofs that is not the case.
In July, your department issued a memo stating that it had conducted an exhaustive review of the Epstein files and concluded that no additional individuals would be charged.
So I did go over to the Department of Justice yesterday.
I would note that 400 and all our 35 members are in the House, and there are four computers.
So it would take many months to actually have the time.
I only had a few hours.
I think the transparency argument is really kind of a sham because it is not really.
It is not possible to really go in.
I did, however, see a U.S. Attorney information for the Southern District of New York indicating that there were additional survivors and probable co-conspirators.
Other members of Congress have uncovered likely co-conspirators whose names were blocked out.
Now, the Epstein-Filed Transparency Act, which all but one member of this House voted for and the President signed, requires the Department to release everything except that it needs to be redacted to protect the victims or an ongoing prosecution, which apparently there is none from the testimony we have received.
I am concerned that this act has not been fully complied with.
When Director Patel came to the committee, he admitted that up to 1,000 FBI agents had gone through the files and redacted President Trump's name from them.
And it is pretty clear that what has been transmitted from the FBI continues to redact President Trump's name, even though he is mentioned thousands of times in these files.
So I think the credibility of the Department in terms of complying with the Act has been damaged.
And I think the Department's credibility has been damaged in other ways.
I think we all saw the horrible video of American citizens being killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis.
And I think how the Department has handled these cases raises a lot of doubt about the department.
State and local police in Minnesota got a court order to get access to the crime scene to be sure evidence would be properly preserved by Federal agents.
But the agents defied the court order.
And in a departure from general policy, the DOJ is not collaborating with State and local law enforcement on these homicides.
So I really think that is a disgraceful approach to the homicides of American citizens and really does nothing to bring credit to your department.
Regular order is you got to state the rule and I am trying to make a point of order that the witness without responding to a question has attacked me personally.
I think it's pathetic that she can't answer the questions in this attack.
In August of last year, I sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking for assistance in seeking compensation for the town of Lac de Flambeau.
Town of Lac de Flambeau is in my district, and your office replied that it was an ongoing matter and unable to comment on it, which I understand.
That's just fine.
I want to set this up just as a reminder.
So, three years ago, it was at this time of year that four roads were blockaded in the town of Lac de Flambeau, and the temperature was 25 below zero.
People had to park their cars at a neighbor's place, take the snowmobile across the lake to get their car, and then be able to drive into town.
There were people 80 and 90 years old that could not were very concerned that they'd be able to get emergency medical services.
And the perpetrators of this, the tribe out there, they demanded compensation from the town.
I would call it extortion.
They ultimately got $600,000 from the town of Lac de Flambeau.
The unfortunate part, Mr. Chairman, is that the Biden administration took the side of the perpetrators who closed those roads off, and the Biden administration made it clear to the town of Lac de Flambeau that we are not on your side in regards to this.
Well, fortunately, there was a federal judge that said, No, this is wrong, what happened?
And these roads should be left open, they should continue to be left open.
My question to you is: Are you willing to work with my office and with the town of Lac de Flambeau to further investigate this matter and seek compensation from the tribal government after their extortion of $600,000 from this little town in northern Wisconsin?
Mr. Chairman, I would just add, we were highlighting these miscarriages of justice in the previous administration.
This is just another one of those small examples, no different than the Catholic Diocese in Richmond and many others that you have retold so many times.
But here's another instance of what they did to a small town and nearly bankrupted them as a result of it.
Fortunately, there was a federal judge that saw through it and has fixed it.
I want to move on to fraud enforcement.
You have established a national fraud enforcement division.
Well, it's not only rampant in Minnesota, it's rampant throughout this country.
Much of it is in California, as you know, and other places.
Yes, we are working on it actively.
Our criminal fraud division has been working on it.
We are expanding that.
It was the Vice President's idea to come up with this amazing separate fraud division, which we are establishing and going nonstop, not only to expose the fraud in Minnesota, but around the country.
It's taxpayer dollars that have been stolen from the American people.
And we are committed to recovering that money and holding those people accountable.
So you would encourage every governor across the United States, after what we have seen in Minnesota, what we almost certainly know is happening in other states.
You mentioned California.
You would agree that every governor should avail themselves of federal resources to make sure that this industrial-scale fraud is rooted out to protect the taxpayers of the United States.
First, I'd like to thank you for holding this hearing and holding it in a proper fashion as you have.
Secondly, I'd like to thank all of the victims of the Epstein case who come here to attend this hearing for doing it and for being brave and trying to move this justice forward.
I apologize.
I can't do it, but the Attorney General not recognizing you.
That's embarrassing.
I am from Memphis, General Bondi, and Memphis does have the task force there.
The Memphis Safe Task Force has been operating in Memphis for several months.
And we do have a Democratic Mayor, Paul Young, and he's not against the tax task force, but he is against ICE being in Memphis, and he's not in favor of the National Guard being in Memphis.
And I concur with him on those positions.
I think the DEA being there, the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, the FBI, who have been in Memphis in other ways, having more people there is good for Memphis.
Crime has gone down in Memphis, but it went down 25 percent before the task force got there under the direction of Mayor Young and Director Davis, Chief Davis.
It's gone down about 15 percent more since then.
And that's good.
But I would like to comment that Mexico City's homicide rate has gone down 40 percent during the same time when Memphis' has only gone down 25 percent, and that's not necessarily because of the task force, although the mayor says he thinks it's helped.
So I thank you for that.
You would agree, I presume, that violent crime in communities across our country is critically important, and that's why the task force is there.
Yes, and if I can just add to that, I think the surge, the FBI, our FBI, under the leadership of Director Patel, came in and did a surge in Memphis prior, yes, right, prior to the task force.
One problem I've got with where we are in priorities here.
A recent Department of Justice National Institute of Justice report based on arrest records in Texas and in California found that undocumented immigrants were less than half as likely as U.S.-born Americans to be arrested for homicide.
And this pattern holds for assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and arson.
Half as likely to be arrested for drug offenses.
So I ask you, and I've written to you about this, there are TV ads that run that say to local law enforcement specifically, are you tired of having your hands handcuffed because you can't do the things you wanted to do when you joined?
And if you want to do something different, join ICE, and you'll get a $50,000 bonus and we'll pay off your debts, student debts, and we'll help you with pensions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So they're encouraging local law enforcement to leave local law enforcement and go to work for ICE.
We need people working in the front lines and local law enforcement to protect our citizens from the worst of the worst.
The worst of the worst are not the immigrants.
The worst of the worst records show are native-born Americans, and they are committing crimes that hurt our citizens and our cities.
And you're working against it, and thank you for that.
But by trying to get our local law enforcement, where we have an undercount of officers in Memphis, to leave Memphis and go to work for ICE to deport people is a wrong priority.
Why are we trying to get people, policemen who are working on the front lines, to leave the front lines, take the $50,000 and go to work for ICE instead of working to fight the worst of the worst?
Congressman, I have not yet seen that commercial, that ad.
I would argue that we need strong people in both local law enforcement, state law enforcement, and all of our federal agencies working together.
I've seen some of the worst of the worst violent criminals, violent criminals who were in this country illegally.
We both know that.
And in Memphis, working hand in hand, I want to stick with Memphis and your mayor and what you discussed because there have been nearly 6,000 arrests as of February 8th, and I think you agree with this in your district, in your district, and almost 600 gang members.
What we found in Memphis, a lot of the gangs are local gangs, but 600 gang members were taken off.
I mean, you have a right to petition the government under the First Amendment.
That doesn't mean you can come into this room and start screaming at Mr. Raskin or me or anybody else and disrupt a congressional hearing.
You have a right to protest on the street, but that doesn't give you a right to go into the Capitol and disrupt Congress.
Something these guys talk about every day.
You can't do that.
So when Don Lemon said that he was exercising his First Amendment free press rights, freedom of the press rights, that's not really accurate because he was trampling on other individuals' rights.
And isn't it true that Mr. Lemon met at a shopping center with the rioters who entered City's church in St. Paul, met with them prior to marching to the church?
He did meet, and this is a pending case right now, so I will only stick to what is in the four corners of the unsealed indictment, if I could, Chairman.
Yeah, I'm there's a lot a lot more that will come out.
But under the four corners of the indictment, yes, he did.
They had an operation called Operation Pull-Up.
They said they were gearing for a resistance.
They met in a parking lot and they caravanned to a church on a Sunday morning when people were worshiping together.
That he was in Minnesota and that, as you said, they were gearing up for an operation.
So you, again, you can't do that.
This is why this is, I think, so important that this guy be held accountable and I think why you guys have charged him and indicted him.
Moving to the second subject here.
Will John Brennan be indicted?
Mr. Brennan lied to the committee, which you're not supposed to do, last Congress when we deposed him.
He definitely lied, 18 USC 1001, we're all familiar with it.
He lied to the committee and the committee, the Congress, and I think the country would like to know if, in fact, he's going to be indicted for lying.
And here's why it's so important.
I'll give you a chance to respond.
Here's why it's so important.
It wasn't just that he lied to us, it's what he lied to us about.
He lied to us about when all this weaponization against the President of the United States started.
He lied to us about the dossier and specifically what role the dossier played in the intelligence community assessment.
Because we know back when President Trump was first elected first term, this is when it all started, which led to the Mueller and to the impeachment and to the Jack Smith and all the stuff that's happened in the last decade.
But it began here and he lied to Congress about the role he played.
And I just want to read a couple of things he said during that deposition before I give you a chance to respond.
Mr. Brennan, when asked a question, said the CIA was not involved at all with the dossier.
He said it was their purview, FBI's purview, and not ours.
He also said the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment.
Well, that's interesting because declassified information that was declassified this past summer by the CIA says something entirely different.
It says, Brennan, I want to put this one up if we have it.
It says, Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that, quote, this is released by the CIA Director Ratcliffe.
My bottom line is that what I believe that that information warrants inclusion in the report, he was further asked by an CIA official, the same officer said when he approached the director and asked and that the director refused to remove it after being explained this wasn't good.
With the dossier's many flaws, he said, yes, but doesn't it ring true?
So this is John Brennan using that document to change intelligence community assessment, which I think led to all the stuff we've seen over the last decade.
And I think this committee and the country, Congress and the country would like to know if Mr. Brennan is going to be indicted.
General Bondi, it's been reported that there were at one point 1,000 personnel assigned to the task of identifying and scrubbing Donald Trump's name from the Epstein files.
And I wanted to ask you about that also, because it's a different question that you're getting to now.
There were 500 DOJ lawyers and others assigned the task of redacting the appropriate information, including identities of the Epstein victim survivors from the Epstein files prior to their release.
General Bundy, would you agree that your eight years of service as the State of Florida's Attorney General, the third largest state in the nation, served as an excellent preparation for your current role as Attorney General for the United States of America?
Clearly, the definition of sexual assault cases, you are acutely aware of how important it is to protect the identity of victims of sexual assault, correct?
I just simply asked: are you aware of the fact that it's vitally important to protect the identity of sexual assault victims as you prosecute the people they accuse of assaulting them?
Well, it means you're nice to the Republicans and you turn like Hyde on Democrats.
But let me ask you this, ma'am.
We have the Epstein victim survivors here today.
Representative Jayapal asked a simple question if you would be so kind and honorable as to turn around and face them and apologize to them for outing them.
I mean, how many lives have been derailed because your department was either sloppy and incompetent or willfully trying to intimidate and punish these ladies.
Attorney General Bondi, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have spent the past several months attacking the administration for doing exactly what the American people wanted when they overwhelmingly elected President Trump, securing our border and enforcing our immigration laws.
I find it a bit ironic because this is the same party who just a few years ago were openly supporting strong immigration enforcement after witnessing criminal, illegal aliens wreak havoc on the American communities.
While we need to address the issue of immigration and the challenge we have of undocumented people in our country, we certainly don't want any more coming in.
Every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.
The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants.
The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.
That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.
unidentified
Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.
When we use phrases like undocumented workers, we convey a message to the American people that their government is not serious about combating illegal immigration, which the American people overwhelmingly oppose.
If you don't think it's illegal, you're not going to say it.
We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.
So, Attorney General Bondi, what's the Trump administration DOJ doing to end the open border policies of the prior administration that saw dangerous drugs and criminal aliens flood our communities?
Congressman, President Trump has worked tirelessly, as you know, to close our border, which is what the Democrats had asked for in that video.
President Trump closed our borders on day one.
He is protecting Americans.
He is protecting our kids from the influx of drugs that were flowing into this country from Mexico.
The fentanyl precursors that were coming from China, these precursors were taken from China into Mexico.
And in Mexico, they were mixed and freely taken right into our country, along with gang members, MS-13, TDA, freely coming into our cities around our country, thanks to Joe Biden's open border policies.
That has stopped under Donald Trump.
It will no longer happen under this administration.
And he is doing everything to keep Americans safe.
And let me continue.
When he was elected overwhelmingly by the American people, the majority of the American people wanted Donald Trump.
One of the main reasons was border security and keeping Americans safe.
And that's exactly what he did.
And that's why today the other side sits here.
They yell, they cut me off.
They want to yell.
They want to ask a question and don't want answers because they want to distract from all the great things that this president and this administration working hand in hand.
And that includes Secretary Noam, who has closed our borders, and Tom Homan, who has closed our borders to keep Americans safe.
And they're trying to distract from that, and they're not going to do it because the American people are smarter than that, and they see through their theatrics.
Just quickly, yesterday, Senator Asley reached out to my office to tell me that I was one of the 20 members that was now disclosed were under surveillance from Jack Smith.
This brings up the question of non-disclosed orders and whether or not they should apply to members of Congress.
But with my phone records being surveilled, as well as looks like 19 other members of Congress, I'm just wondering how DOJ views that.
Madam Attorney General, you acknowledged earlier to Mr. Johnson that President Trump was mentioned and the release countless times, you said, in the Epstein files.
I just want to play a video, though, for you that I think speaks to the frustration that many of these victims have.
Of times Trump's name appears in the files, so it could at least be a thousand times.
And the Attorney General acknowledged what Mr. Patel would not acknowledge, that it was way more than 1,000 times.
But I want to move, Madam Attorney General, to weaponization of government.
And yesterday it was reported that six members of Congress had indictments sought against him and they were not returned by a grand jury.
My colleagues have spoken about their frustration of being in subpoenas and having cell phone records combed through.
Well, in 2017 and 2018, Adam Schiff and I had our cell phone records and email records combed through, not by you, but a different Department of Justice under the President.
It was in retaliation for our role in the Russia interference campaign.
An Inspector General report would find this improper and that the predicate for it was absurd.
In 2020, after sitting on two committees that were a part of the President's first impeachment, an FBI agent leaked my cooperation in a national security case where my campaign was targeted.
The president's FBI senior leadership authorized two statements to the press that said I was never suspected of wrongdoing and only helped the investigation, but that didn't stop the death threats or my GOP colleagues from referring me to an ethics investigation where Kevin McCarthy's chairman on the ethics committee would find the same thing as the FBI.
Our current FBI director would then write a book called Government Gangsters and identify a long list of enemies.
About a quarter of them have been either investigated or indicted.
He listed me at the very top along with Adam Schiff and during that same testimony refused to recuse himself when asked if he would recuse if any case came across his desk involving me or people on that list.
Since that testimony, his department has put me under investigation with Senator and Schiff for the nonsense mortgage fraud cases that we've seen.
I get it.
This is what the president does.
I've priced it in.
We have a bingo card at home that my kids have made of what will come next.
I expected that the president would come after his enemies, but what I want to talk to you next is serious, and I did not expect this would happen, and I'd like your help on it.
The president has inspired death threats against me and many sitting up here with me.
In June 2025, an individual left 11 voicemails at my district office.
On the voicemails, they said, get the message to him.
I'm going to hunt him down, that motherfucker, and toss his ass over the Golden Gate Bridge by my fucking self.
Donald Trump's Department of Justice in the Northern District of California declined to prosecute.
On May 14, 2025, on Twitter, responding to something I posted, an individual said, no, it wasn't, Eric, and now I'm going to kill you.
The Department of Justice from the Southern District of Texas declined to prosecute.
May through December of 2025, we received messages at my office that said, I hope somebody shoots you and your children and your wife in the head.
Pew pew, motherfucker.
Pew pew.
I would stay indoors as much as possible.
And my children, unfortunately, have to do that.
The Department of Justice has not charged this individual and cited that he's a prolific caller and has health conditions.
Although what we have found in our own investigation and his voicemails is that he has said he will employ others to do this.
The president can come after me.
It's fine.
I'm in the arena.
So are these folks.
But we never expected that the Department of Justice would not seek to prosecute and investigate those who are making threats against us.
And that would include those on that side of the aisle.
And I'm just asking for your help to protect life because life is at risk with the environment we're in right now.
The gentleman yields back, and we're sorry for what the gentleman and his family have had to go through.
We appreciate what the Attorney General said.
And I think some of the things that the gentleman from California related, we can all relate to, and it's unfortunate it's wrong, as the Attorney General said.
And we appreciate the help we get from the Justice Department.
With that, we will now recognize the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Van Drew.
unidentified
Thank you, Chairman.
I don't know where to begin.
Thank you for being here, General.
I'm right in front of you.
I just, I have to mention this first.
You know, I used this word before, and my friends on the other side of the aisle got mad at me, but hypocrisy.
Epstein, Epstein, Epstein.
But for years on the other side of the aisle, we heard nothing.
Crickets, not a word.
Nothing was said when they were in control.
Nothing was mentioned basically to last summer.
And the ranking member points out that he did do something last year.
Yeah, he did a letter complaining about the plea deal for Maxwell.
But it wasn't a big deal.
Epstein Files Revelations00:12:58
unidentified
Then we get a new administration, and all of a sudden it's a big deal, and they feign concern, they're upset, they're investigating.
They had all these years and all this time.
And in fact, Stacey Plaskett, and we all know that name, when they had a congressional hearing, Democratic member were taking texts from Epstein on questions to ask to go after Trump.
So Epstein was using her Democratic colleague as a tool to go after President Trump.
Just everybody keep that in mind.
And then we talk about ICE and how horrible it is.
And there are concerns.
Everybody wants everything to go right.
Nobody ever wants to see somebody die.
And they complain about it.
But at the same time, hypocrisy, they encourage constituents to go after the ICE agents, to challenge them, to hurt them, to attack them.
And that doesn't make sense.
That's hypocrisy.
And then we hear about the concern of going after Democrats, that the legal system, that judiciary and Department of Justice is going after Democrats.
But they literally rework the legal system under Alvin Bragg and Letitia James to go after Republicans and those sympathetic to Republicans.
So, I mean, be careful when you accuse others that you're not guilty yourself.
Be careful of what you say because you've got a history, and it's easy to go over it.
You know, I just want to talk about where we were and where we are now.
We had over 10 million illegal crossings in the past between 2020 and 24.
Over 10 million.
There's probably a much bigger number.
I'm being conservative.
We were told the people weren't dangerous, but they were, General.
They were dangerous, many of them.
More than 300 individuals on the terror watch list during that time.
Violent criminals came across, as we saw consequences where mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, children were raped, murdered, hurt, abused, beaten, trafficked, all from the drugs.
My God, the drugs they brought into our babies in this country.
73,000 illegals with criminal histories.
20,000 with convictions of assault, robbery, and sex offenses.
13,000 convicted murderers in our beautiful country.
15,000 convicted sexual assault offenders.
It was madness.
It was insanity.
It's bizarre.
It's perverse.
What in God's name were you doing?
So we finally are cleaning this up now.
We're finally trying to make it right and safe for our people.
So my questions are this.
General, do you believe in removing criminal, illegal aliens from our communities will save American lives?
Yes, and given the cases that you just discussed, that's proof of it every single day.
President Trump is committed to that.
This entire cabinet is committed to that and making and keeping Americans safe.
unidentified
Thank you.
Would you agree that, and thank you for doing that, would you agree that allowing individuals with known criminal histories to enter and remain in the United States, we knew this back then.
They knew it.
Would you agree that creates serious risks to our public safety?
I know the answers, but let's just say them clearly.
Would you agree that when dangerous individuals are released instead of detained, and they were released over and over and over again, and these are the real issues, this is really what America cares about.
They want their children and their families to be safe.
Do you think if you release them instead of detaining them, that crimes will happen because of that?
Would you agree that cooperation between, and this is a biggie, and I'm going to ask you to elaborate on this.
This is a big deal.
This is why some of the problems we're seeing in some of the places like Minnesota are happening, that cooperation between federal and local enforcement, which we always used to have, helps remove violent offenders from our communities that we should be a team.
In other words, when the local enforcement is forced by the politicians, not their fault, not to do their job and not cooperate, why does it create the situations that we see where we have need for crowd control?
By the way, they're not peaceful.
Those are not peaceful protesters.
We know what a peaceful protester is.
When you spit on law enforcement, when you push them, when you hit them, when you beat their car, if you can answer the question, thank you.
You have now established that we please put the photos back up, that we are looking at a sex trafficking victim.
Under the Federal Victims Trafficking Protection Act, not only is Jeffrey Epstein guilty, but anyone who patronizes Epstein's sex operation is also guilty of a crime.
That's why I find it absolutely despicable that you sought to protect Epstein's clients, like former Prince Andrew.
Last July, you closed the case on Epstein's abusers.
The July 2025 memo from your Department of Justice stated, quote, we did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.
These two photos, please put the photos back up.
These two photos staring you in the face are evidence of a crime and more than enough evidence to predicate an investigation against former Prince Andrew.
So I ask you, Attorney General Pam Bondi, why did you shut down this investigation last July and why have you not prosecuted former Prince Andrew?
This is what Congressman Lou didn't want to talk about.
He didn't want to talk about all the crime that is happening in his state.
California refuses to honor detainees because of its dangerous sanctuary city policies.
The refusal means California has released 4,561 criminal illegal aliens, criminal illegal aliens, onto its street.
The crimes of these aliens include 31 homicides, 661 assaults, 574 burglaries, 184 robberies,
1,489 dangerous drug offenses, 379 weapons offenses, and 234 sexual predator offenses.
That's why they are deflecting.
That's why they're trying to talk about the Epstein files.
That's currently happening in his home state.
unidentified
I'll look now at our scheduled live coverage today on the C-SPAN networks.
At 9 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, the House is in and will consider a bill that would stop the ATF from classifying some less than lethal projectile weapons, such as tasers and stun guns, as firearms.
On C-SPAN 2 at 9 a.m. Eastern, the House Democratic Steering Committee holds a discussion on the Trump administration's immigration and customs enforcement.
Attorney Discusses ICE Shooting00:00:31
unidentified
We'll hear from the attorney representing the family of Renee Goode, who was killed by ICE agents in Minnesota, along with other witnesses.
Then at 11 a.m. Eastern, the U.S. Senate is expected to continue work on funding for the Department of Homeland Security before a Friday deadline that would result in a partial shutdown for the department, with the Secret Service, Coast Guard, TSA, and more losing funding.
Democratic members are arguing for reforms to its immigration enforcement agencies before committing to fund the department after two fatal shootings by their officers in Minnesota last month.