WASHINGTON — Attorney General Pam Bondi’s approach Tuesday to fielding hostile questions posed by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee about the perceived political weaponization of the Justice Department was simple and brutal: don’t answer, just attack.
Bondi attempted to cast more than four hours of stonewalling senatorial queries about decisions on her watch as an aggrieved defense of President Donald Trump, herself and other administration appointees.
Bondi’s calculated bombast at the oversight hearing reflected an effort across the Trump administration to flip potentially damaging — or revealing — moments of public accountability into opportunities to savage political opponents.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, opened the questioning by asking if the White House had consulted Bondi on the deployment of federal troops to Chicago. She ignored the question and instead raised her voice to accuse Durbin, a 28-year veteran of the Senate who has delivered billions of dollars in criminal justice funding to his state, of disloyalty to his constituents.
“I wish you’d love Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she said.
Oversight hearings have always had elements of political theater. But the approach taken by Bondi, and previously by FBI Director Kash Patel, has been different from that taken by any of their predecessors. It is characterized by a contemptuous refusal to even cursorily address inconvenient questions and the use of prepared attacks against Democrats to change the subject and drown out criticism.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked her about the Justice Department’s decision to drop an investigation into Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, who was recorded in September 2024 accepting a bag with $50,000 in cash in an undercover FBI investigation.
“What became of the $50,000?” Whitehouse asked.
Bondi did not answer the question, and instead attacked Whitehouse by demanding to know why he once took campaign donations from Reid Hoffman, a Democratic donor Republicans have linked to Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious sex trafficker.
Republicans on the panel did not press her to provide answers, with the exception of Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who asked Bondi to elaborate on her rationale for the dispatch of the National Guard to Chicago.
But they largely seemed unconcerned about Trump’s efforts to erode the department’s independence. Their focus instead was on the actions of the previous administration, and what they saw as the weaponization of the department under Attorney General Merrick Garland against Trump and other Republicans.
On the eve of the hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican who leads the committee, released an unclassified 2023 document showing that the FBI analyzed phone records of nine Republican lawmakers as part of the investigation by Jack Smith, the special counsel, into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
That line of argument formed the core of the Republican response to Trump’s increasingly overt pressure on the department to prosecute — or simply humiliate — the people he hates. They have yet to produce evidence to back their claims that the Biden White House pushed the inquiry, and much remains unknown about the records’ role in the investigation.
But the most contentious, if not particularly illuminating, exchanges took place between Democrats and Bondi, whose voice — already hoarsened by allergies or a head cold — steadily deteriorated as the hearing dragged on, along with any semblance of bipartisan civility.
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