The House Oversight Committee just made it official: Attorney General Pam Bondi is being hauled in for testimony over the Justice Department’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s files.
The vote Wednesday was 24-19. Five Republicans broke ranks with party leadership to join the Democrats, including Rep. Nancy Mace, who put forward the subpoena motion. The other GOP rebels were Reps. Tim Burchett, Lauren Boebert, Michael Cloud, and Scott Perry.
The Justice Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“AG Bondi claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein files. The record is clear: they have not,” Mace wrote on X, blasting the department for withholding key materials.
She called the Epstein investigation “one of the greatest cover-ups in American history” and accused the DOJ of prioritizing protection of the powerful over delivering justice. “Three million documents have been released, and we still don’t have the full truth. Videos are missing. Audio is missing. Logs are missing. There are millions more documents out there,” Mace said, according to NBC News.
Speaking after the vote, Mace emphasized the need for direct answers: “I know that Bondi has testified before the Judiciary Committee, but she’s not testified before me or the Oversight Committee. I need to get to the bottom of this for other survivors of Jeffrey Epstein.”
Mace didn’t hold back on her warning either. “I have a lot more questions, and I don’t expect to be talking about the stock market, so she better not bring those notes when she comes to the Oversight Committee,” she said, referencing Bondi’s contentious last hearing, where the attorney general repeatedly brought up the Trump-era stock market.
No date has been set for Bondi to appear.
Bondi defended the department last month before the House Judiciary Committee, claiming the DOJ had released more than three million pages of Epstein files in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. “More than 500 attorneys and reviewers spent thousands of hours painstakingly reviewing millions of pages… while doing our very best in the time frame allotted by the legislation to protect victims,” she said.
Critics, including co-authors of the transparency bill, Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, insist the department is still breaking the law by withholding roughly three million additional documents. The DOJ claims some files are duplicates, others are withheld under privileges like attorney-client or deliberative process, and some are in foreign languages or sealed by judges.
Oversight leaders and Epstein survivors have slammed the redactions, which they say hide potential accomplices while leaving victims’ information unnecessarily exposed. With the subpoena now in play, Bondi faces a tougher spotlight as lawmakers push for full transparency on what many see as a continuing cover-up.
