US attorney general Pam Bondi spent more than four contentious hours on Tuesday testifying to the Senate judiciary committee, where she sparred repeatedly with Democrats over her handling of the justice department as US president Donald Trump erodes its independence and seeks prosecutions of his enemies.
Here are three key takeaways from the hearing.
Bondi put on a combative, cagey performance
Bondi spent much of the hearing counter-punching against Democrats, who demanded answers about how she was overseeing a raft of politically sensitive cases, and the firings and resignations of prosecutors and FBI agents who handled such cases.
The hearing was far more confrontational than the last time she appeared before the committee in January.
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Back then, Bondi pledged to run an independent justice department, but Democrats said her tenure in just nine months had shown that to be a hollow promise. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois accused her of leaving “an enormous stain in American history”.
When Durbin challenged the president’s decision to send national guard troops to Chicago, Bondi replied, “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate president Trump”.
Democrats also repeatedly asked about the decision by Trump’s justice department to drop an investigation of White House border czar Tom Homan, who has denied committing any crimes.
In September 2024, Homan accepted a Cava bag with $50,000 (€43,000) cash in it, as part of an undercover FBI investigation in which agents posed as businessmen seeking federal contracts, according to people familiar with the matter, who said there was an audio recording of the interaction.
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Bondi refused to say at the hearing whether Homan kept the $50,000.
“Clearly, you’re a failed lawyer,” she told Senator Adam Schiff of California, himself a target of an investigation Trump has pushed for, when he pressed her on the Homan inquiry.
Schiff pressed further: Would she support the release of the recording?
“Will you apologise to Donald Trump?” she shot back.
The Epstein case still haunts the Trump administration
One of the most difficult moments for Bondi came at the hands of a Republican, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who gently asked about the case of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in jail awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking.
Bondi has faced blowback from the right for first promising to deliver scandalous details from the FBI files about Epstein before reversing herself and insisting that there was nothing else to investigate and no more documents would be released. The department also said it did not have evidence that he blackmailed anyone.
The administration’s tortured position on the Epstein case got more complicated recently when Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary and a former neighbour of Epstein, declared in an interview with The New York Post that Epstein was “the greatest blackmailer ever”.
Kennedy asked Bondi about those claims, and whether anyone at the FBI or the justice department had interviewed Lutnick.
No-one had, she said. Pressed further by Kennedy, Bondi said that if Lutnick “wants to speak to the FBI,” and if Kash Patel, the bureau’s director, wants him interviewed, that would “absolutely” happen.
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Republicans accused Jack Smith of spying on their phones
As Democrats focused on how Bondi has handled a host of cases, Republicans sought to stoke outrage over an investigative step taken two years ago by Jack Smith, then the special counsel, to review the phone records of nine GOP lawmakers from around the time of the January 6th, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
A day before the hearing, the committee’s Republican chair, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, released a page of an FBI document showing that agents had analysed the toll records of the lawmakers, meaning a list of who they called, how long the calls lasted, and when and roughly where the calls were made. The phone records were analysed in September 2023, examining a four-day time period around January 6th.
Republicans denounced the investigative activity as “spying,” and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of those whose records were taken, declared that the FBI had tapped his phone. Grassley’s public announcement of the issue, however, makes clear that the toll records involved do not include the content of phone calls that result from a wiretap.
The records were sought in 2023 as prosecutors were trying to identify relevant communications between the president and his inner circle with members of Congress on the key days surrounding the violence, according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the decision-making process.
Several Republicans on the committee said they wanted to see a new special counsel appointed to investigate the former special counsel. Patel suggested Tuesday that more agents could be punished over the issue. Nevertheless, the GOP lawmakers showed little interest in calling Smith to testify before the committee.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
