Pressed on Justice Dept. Politicization, Bondi Goes on Attack

 

Pressed on Justice Dept. Politicization, Bondi Goes on Attack

 

At a Senate committee hearing, the attorney general avoided answering pointed queries by repeatedly laying into her questioners and casting her responses as a defense of the Trump administration.

 

Glenn ThrushDevlin Barrett

By Glenn Thrush and Devlin Barrett

Reporting from Washington

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/us/politics/pam-bondi-hearing.html

Oct. 7, 2025

 

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s approach on 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.

 

Ms. Bondi attempted to cast more than four hours of stonewalling senatorial queries about decisions on her watch as an aggrieved defense of President Trump, herself and other administration appointees.

 

Ms. 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.

 

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, opened the questioning by asking if the White House had consulted Ms. Bondi on the deployment of federal troops to Chicago. She ignored the question and instead raised her voice to accuse Mr. 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 loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she said.

 

Oversight hearings have always had elements of political theater. But the approach taken by Ms. Bondi, and previously by the F.B.I. 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.

 

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, 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 F.B.I. investigation.

 

“What became of the $50,000?” Mr. Whitehouse asked.

 

Ms. Bondi did not answer the question, and instead attacked Mr. 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.

 

Later, Mr. Whitehouse said that he had scanned campaign finance records and determined that “nobody by the name of Reid (or Reed) Hoffman” had ever contributed to his campaigns.

 

“Attorney General Bondi made up nonsense to avoid answering whether the White House border czar returned” the $50,000, he said in a statement.

 

Republicans on the panel did not press her to provide answers, with the exception of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who asked Ms. Bondi to elaborate on her rationale for the dispatch of the National Guard to Chicago.

 

But they largely seemed unconcerned about Mr. 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 former Attorney General Merrick B. Garland against Mr. Trump and other Republicans.

 

On the eve of the hearing, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Republican who leads the committee, released an unclassified 2023 document showing that the F.B.I. analyzed phone records of nine Republican lawmakers as part of the investigation by Jack Smith, the special counsel, into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

 

Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, claimed the bureau “tapped” his phone.

 

The one-page document, which Mr. Hawley had blown up into a large poster next to him, appeared to contradict that assertion, revealing only that Mr. Smith’s team sought approval to retrieve metadata to monitor communications between Mr. Trump, his associates and lawmakers around the time of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

 

That line of argument formed the core of the Republican response to Mr. 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 Ms. 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.

 

When Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asked her why she had not recused herself from a case involving a client of her old lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, Ms. Bondi shouted: “How dare you! I am a career prosecutor. Don’t you ever challenge my integrity.”

 

She brought up a report from 2010 about Mr. Blumenthal falsely claiming he served as a soldier in Vietnam.

 

“I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service,” she said.

 

Soon after, Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat being investigated by the Justice Department for mortgage fraud after Mr. Trump targeted him for his role in the president’s impeachments, denounced what he called the “brazenly political” decision-making at the agency.

 

He ticked off a list, more than a dozen items long, of the questions Ms. Bondi had declined to answer before he returned to the matter of Mr. Homan’s mysterious bag of cash and the rationale for killing the investigation.

 

Ms. Bondi crossed her arms defensively and settled in for a fight.

 

“Will you support a request by this committee to provide that Homan tape or tapes to the committee? Yes or no?” he asked.

 

“You can talk to Patel about that,” she said, referring to the F.B.I. director.

 

“I’m talking to you,” he replied. “Will you support that request?”

 

“Will you apologize to Donald Trump?” she said, before calling him “a failed lawyer” and adding that she would have fired him if he had worked for her.

 

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.

 

Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.