U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi faced a blistering five-hour confrontation on Capitol Hill Wednesday, February 11, 2026, as lawmakers from both parties accused her of orchestrating a “cover-up” to protect powerful associates of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. During a high-stakes hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Bondi was grilled over the Justice Department’s (DOJ) handling of millions of pages of investigative records released late last month.
The most explosive exchange involved Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), a co-author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, who accused Bondi of a “massive failure” to comply with the law. Massie revealed that the DOJ had initially redacted the name of billionaire Leslie Wexner in an FBI document listing potential co-conspirators, despite Wexner being a well-known figure in the Epstein saga. Massie claimed he caught the department “red-handed” in an attempt to shield influential figures while simultaneously failing to protect the identities of Epstein’s victims, whose unredacted names and sensitive details were inadvertently exposed in the document dump.
Democrats on the committee intensified the pressure, with Representative Jamie Raskin accusing Bondi of redacting the names of abusers “to spare them embarrassment and disgrace.” The hearing turned personal when Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) asked Bondi to turn around and apologize to several Epstein survivors seated in the public gallery for the department’s “botched” rollout of the files. Bondi refused, dismissing the request as “theatrics” and “getting in the gutter.”
The controversy was further fueled by reports that Bondi appeared at the witness table with a “burn book”—a binder allegedly containing opposition research on the committee members. Images captured by photojournalists showed one page labeled “Jayapal Pramila Search History,” leading to accusations that the DOJ is surveilling lawmakers as they sift through unredacted databases at the department’s headquarters.
Bondi defended the DOJ’s performance, noting that over 500 lawyers worked on a compressed timeline to review more than three million pages. She insisted that any disclosure of victim identities was “inadvertent” and praised President Trump as leading the “most transparent administration in history.” However, the refusal to answer how many new co-conspirator indictments have been issued since the file release has left many observers skeptical. This deepening scandal underscores the ongoing struggle for judicial accountability in the U.S. as the fallout from the Epstein investigation continues to dog the highest levels of the American government.
