President Donald Trump may have gotten himself into the Jeffrey Epstein mess, but Attorney General Pam Bondi needs to get him out of it—and fast, some House Republicans have warned.
The attorney general has become the poster child for MAGA anger over the administration’s failure to produce new revelations in the case of the disgraced financier, who is said to have killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
But Bondi is stuck between a rock and a hard place, as she tries to satisfy MAGA’s thirst for new Epstein dirt without implicating her boss in the scandal.
Trump and Epstein were good friends for years, and Bondi told Trump in May that his name appears repeatedly in the files that his base is calling for him to release.
Republicans are nevertheless pinning the debacle on her and demanding that she find a way to fix it, according to a new report from Politico.
“She has very little time to turn this around,” a House Republican told the outlet.
A second added, “She is in for a rough September at the very least,” after lawmakers return from the August recess.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and Department of Justice for comment.
The scandal represents something of an existential crisis for MAGA, whose members have long believed the Epstein case ended prematurely due to a “deep state” cover-up designed to protect his rich and powerful associates.
For years, Trump has stoked the deep state conspiracy theory and vowed to root out its members.
He appointed two Epstein truthers—Kash Patel and Dan Bongino—to the lead the FBI, and in February, Bondi said during a Fox News interview that a list of Epstein’s powerful clients was sitting on her desk for her to review.
But instead of releasing the Epstein files, the FBI and the DOJ concluded earlier this month that there was no client list, and that Epstein had died by suicide and not by murder, as many MAGA faithful believe.
Bondi’s Fox News interview has made her an easy scapegoat.
“I think she, from pillar to post, handled this thing so badly and bizarrely,” a senior House GOP aide told Politico. “It was tough to watch the whole thing. We were just like ‘What the f--- are they doing over there.’”
Bondi has tried to save face by asking the courts in Florida and New York—where Epstein was prosecuted—to release the grand jury testimony in the case.
But critics immediately pointed out that effort was likely doomed to fail, and that even if it did succeed, the information revealed would be limited in scope.
The DOJ also sent Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, to meet with Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, 63, who is serving a 20-year jail sentence after being convicted in 2021 of luring and grooming young girls for Epstein.
Despite those efforts, House Speaker Mike Johnson has demanded “transparency,” and told CBS on Thursday that there are “good questions” about how Bondi’s DOJ has handled the situation.
