Attorney General Pam Bondi walked into Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing not to testify — but to wage war. What was supposed to be a fact-finding session quickly devolved into a spectacle of soundbites, deflection, and open hostility, with legal experts and former officials now calling her performance “completely antagonistic” and flat-out “low-level BS.”
From the moment the hearing began, Bondi appeared less interested in answering questions than in executing a strategy of bombastic obstruction.
“She gave no answers, really,” former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman told CNN. “Anything she could deflect, she did… She came in guns a blazing with pre-drafted soundbites, and just whenever there was something she needed to answer, she substituted instead the sort of ‘when did you stop beating your wife’ kind of slurs.”
The most pointed moment came when Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) pressed her on reports of a 2024 bribery scheme involving Border Czar Tom Homan allegedly receiving a bag stuffed with $50,000 in cash. The incident reportedly sparked an FBI probe, but Bondi, rather than address the substance, punted.
“Ask the FBI,” she said.
Litman wasn’t impressed. “She deflected from some really basic questions,” he said, calling it “a concerted strategy… to have a sort of, you know, outrage, bombastic kind of presentation.” And to be clear: “It was remarkably unresponsive. And remarkably like I’ve never seen anything like it. Completely antagonistic and contemptuous to the senators.”
Adding to the absurdity, Bondi didn’t just dodge — she arrived prepared to attack. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace noted she brought with her a massive binder stuffed with pre-written talking points and personal digs aimed exclusively at Democrats. It was less a testimony binder and more a campaign opposition file.
“Another exhausting non-answer seemingly read from some sort of opposition research book,” Wallace observed, “that didn’t meet the caliber of something on a congressional campaign from a sitting attorney general.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked a direct question. Bondi flipped through her binder and read aloud a completely unrelated statement from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Theatrics over truth. Deflection over duty.
Wallace pointed out the binder itself raised legal red flags.
“I wonder if the Department of Justice would answer a call from you today about who created that book she was reading from,” she asked NBC News reporter Ken Dilanian, “with attacks on Whitehouse, on his wife’s company. I mean, that is opposition research straight up. And it is a clear violation of the Hatch Act to be created by a government employee.”
The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity on the taxpayer’s dime. If Bondi’s binder of political attacks was prepared by DOJ staff, that’s more than just inappropriate — it’s potentially illegal.
“I’ve never seen that before, have you?” Wallace asked former Sen. Claire McCaskill.
McCaskill didn’t mince words: “It’s low-level BS.”
And the critiques didn’t stop there. Rick Wilson, a former GOP strategist and co-founder of The Lincoln Project, torched Bondi’s performance in a Substack essay that painted her as little more than a MAGA actor playing to a Trump-obsessed audience.
“Today’s Senate Judiciary performance wasn’t testimony; it was crude, overacted scenery-chewing regional dinner theater for the Trump base,” Wilson wrote. “A MAGA striptease dance of performative outrage and imaginary grievance where facts went to die.”
Bondi’s appearance, he argued, had one purpose: please Trump. Full stop.
“Bondi strutted in, dialed the volume to eleven, and delivered the full martyrdom package: a sneering, venomous performance laced with sanctimony and shamelessness… replete with wild accusations and wilder denials.”
Her biggest failure? Epstein. Wilson said she had one job — clean up the narrative around Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. She didn’t.
“MAGA will think she won today,” he wrote, “but on the biggest question in Trump’s cobwebbed brain, she blew it. On Jeffrey Epstein, she failed to exonerate Trump, defend the coverup with anything even vaguely logical, and made the stench of her ongoing coverup even more rancid.”
What emerged from the hearing wasn’t just frustration over Bondi’s evasiveness. It was concern over what her performance represented: a degradation of democratic oversight, a politicization of justice, and a willful rejection of accountability — all wrapped up in a binder full of mudslinging.
For more on the controversy, watch the videos below:
