Former Attorney General Pam Bondi defended the Justice Department's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation during a nearly four-hour closed-door interview before the House Oversight Committee on May 29, conceding redaction errors in the document release while declining to answer questions about President Trump. Bondi told lawmakers the department under her leadership remained committed to securing justice for Epstein's victims.
The session marked the first sustained congressional questioning of the official who oversaw the release of roughly 3 million pages of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell records under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a process Trump cited when he fired Bondi in April after months of criticism over missed deadlines.
Redactions and deferrals
"There were redaction errors," Bondi told the committee, according to her opening remarks. "But since day one of this process, this department has been committed to accountability and transparency." She called the release "an enormously complicated and labor-intensive process" and said she was "proud of the Department's record."
Bondi frequently answered "I did not know" or "I did not recall," deferring repeatedly to Todd Blanche, now the acting attorney general and Trump's former personal attorney. She said she "delegated oversight over this process" to Blanche and pointed to him on questions about documents and redaction mistakes.
Blanche met with Maxwell in 2025, after which the convicted co-conspirator was transferred to a minimum-security prison. Bondi told the committee she was unaware of that meeting. Democrats said they will subpoena Blanche and have signaled they will also seek testimony from FBI Director Kash Patel.
Closed doors
The interview was neither sworn nor videotaped, drawing objections from Democrats. Rep. Robert Garcia of California said Democrats were "incredibly disappointed" the session was not recorded for public release and reported that DOJ counsel intervened to block Bondi from answering questions about Trump. Bondi was represented by Justice Department lawyers, including Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon, an unusual arrangement given that she no longer works at the department.
Outside the room, Epstein survivors pressed for accountability. "I just hope that she does have a moment where she remembers her own humanity and our humanity and finds her compassion and remembers that this is a bigger story than political rhetoric," survivor Dani Bensky said.
Republican framing
Committee Chairman James Comer framed the inquiry around recovering remaining records rather than relitigating Bondi's tenure. "I want every document, I don't want anything held back," Comer said, telling reporters the committee was working to determine "what documents remain, why they haven't been turned over." He added: "The one thing that we can say with confidence thus far is, the survivors were failed by the government."
Bondi's defenders point to the scale of the production and her stated commitment to transparency. The Justice Department, she said, had produced everything mandated by the transparency legislation, and her February 2025 claim that a client list was "sitting on my desk right now" referred, she has said, to related Epstein materials rather than a discrete roster. The department concluded by July 2025 that no such list existed.
Democrats counter that Bondi's deferrals to Blanche moved the central questions one rung up the chain without answering them. The committee's planned subpoena of Blanche, and a parallel push for Patel's testimony, will test whether the closed-door format holds when the witnesses are sitting officials. A date for Blanche's appearance has not been set.