Attorney General Pam Bondi’s department was forced into damage control after a top justice official was secretly recorded telling a date that the Epstein files would be manipulated to protect Republicans.
Joseph Schnitt, an Acting Deputy Chief in the Department of Justice, was caught divulging the information by a woman he met on the Hinge dating app, not realizing she was an undercover operative for the O’Keefe Media Group.
In a video posted online on Thursday, Schnitt is recorded telling the woman that the department would “redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, Democratic people in those files, and have a very slanted version of it come out.”
He also told his date that the decision to move Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, to a lower security prison went against Board of Prisons policy because she was a convicted sex offender, “which means they’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut.”
And he detailed the “internal conflict” between Bondi and FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, who famously clashed earlier this year over the Attorney General’s handling of the files.
“Second-in-command [Dan Bongino] at the FBI has been causing problems, because he’s like, ‘No, these [Epstein Files] have to be released… Bondi wants whatever Trump wants. Internally there’s a lot of conflict,” he said.
The footage was released on social media on Thursday by political activist James O’Keefe, who founded the right-wing Project Veritas before starting the O’Keefe Media Group.
While it is unclear why Schnitt was targeted or when the covert recording was made, it nonetheless triggered a bizarre series of responses from the DOJ.
One of them included a screen grab from a message that Schnitt, an Acting Deputy Chief at the Office of Enforcement Operations, had apparently sent to a superior explaining the honeypot trap.
“I met a woman named Skylar on Hinge, a dating app, in July 2025, her profile is no longer findable,” the highly unusual department post begins.
“We had two dates, August 4 and August 16. She claimed to be an au pair in Georgetown. She gave no clues that she was a reporter or recording our date. Had I a clue, the first date would have immediately ended and there would never have been a second one,” he continued.
“The comments I’ve made were my own personal comments on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done at or via work.”
The department also posted another response through the X account of its spokesperson @DOJSpox47, saying the comments in the video “have absolutely zero bearing with reality and reflect a total lack of knowledge of the DOJ’s review process.”
“The DOJ is committed to transparency and is in compliance with the House Oversight Committee’s request for documents,” it said.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 as he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges involving underage girls.
Maxwell was subsequently convicted to 20 years in prison on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy for helping Epstein recruit and abuse underage girls.
But the issue remains sensitive for Bondi, who has come under fire for months, including among MAGA acolytes, over her handling of the case surrounding convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Tensions escalated earlier this year when the Department issued a memo concluding that there was no more information it could provide, despite Trump earlier promising his supporters full transparency.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sought to quash calls for answers this week by releasing more than 33,000 DOJ files on Epstein, including jail surveillance video, flight logs, court filings, emails, and audio.
But most of the material had already been in the public domain, some of it for years, renewing claims of an ongoing cover-up.
Survivors of Epstein rallied together on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to share their harrowing stories and call for justice.
However, Trump lashed out angrily at the attention being given to the issue and once again described it as a “Democratic hoax” to turn people’s focus away from his presidential achievements.
“We’re having the most successful eight months of any president ever, and that’s what I want to talk about and should be talking about. Not the Epstein hoax,” he said on Wednesday.
