Since pretty much day one of the second Trump administration, United States Attorney General Pam Bondi has rarely been able to withdraw her foot from her mouth for more than a few moments before the next public humiliation comes along and crams it back up there. It was only a month or so in when her Justice Department infamously handed out binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of 15 far-right political activists cosplaying as journalists, only for those poor saps—including Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik—to quickly realize that said binders contained a sum total of zero new pieces of information. This kind of performative non-transparency quickly became the de facto stance of the Justice Department on anything Epstein-related as the year progressed, going quickly from promising the massive revelations that Donald Trump campaigned on, to claiming that the Epstein client list never actually existed within the span of a few months. More recently, she’s been scolded by judges for her attempted novel use of time paradoxes in appointing inept, unqualified U.S. attorneys, and just as that dust was finally dying down, we arrived at last week’s Friday deadline to finally deliver the Epstein Files in earnest, set by the law that Trump himself was more or less forced to sign by defecting Republicans in Congress.
Do you care to hazard a guess of whether the Attorney General pulled that one off without a hitch? Waiting until the very day of the release to make the announcement, Bondi’s Justice Department not-so-shockingly revealed that it would not in fact be releasing all of the Epstein Files on Dec. 19, as required by law, and would instead continue to dribble out hundreds of thousands of (heavily redacted) additional files over the course of coming weeks. That was all the likes of Epstein legislation co-sponsors Rep. Thomas Massie (KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (CA) needed to hear in order to begin loudly and angrily mouthing the word “impeachment.”
Typically, in the second Trump administration, threats of impeachment have had more or less nowhere to go, given Republicans’ slim but still-present control over both chambers of Congress. But in the case of Pam Bondi, the ire certainly seems to cross the aisle, both in terms of earnest disappointment in the performance of Trump’s AG, and in the form of GOP members of Congress who may see Bondi as a convenient sacrificial lamb, someone who can take some portion of the Epstein-related heat away from Trump. Because rest assured, there’s a lot of heat out there at the moment. Just today, a group of more than a dozen of Epstein’s alleged former victims released a statement condemning both the redactions and lack of oversight involved in the materials that have so far been released.
“The public received a fraction of the files, and what we received was riddled with abnormal and extreme redactions with no explanation,” the statement reads. “At the same time, numerous victim identities were left unredacted, causing real and immediate harm. No financial documents were released. Grand jury minutes, though approved by a federal judge for release, were fully blacked out—not the scattered redactions that might been expected to protect victim names, but 119 full pages blacked out. We are told that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of documents still unreleased. These are clear-cut violations of an unambiguous law.”
In response, Massie and Khanna popped up in a joint appearance on CBS News Face the Nation on Sunday, and said that they would immediately move forward on holding Bondi in inherent contempt of Congress, which would theoretically carry daily fines until the law compelling the full Epstein Files release was satisfied.
“We only need the House for inherent contempt, and we’re building a bipartisan coalition,” Khanna said. “And it would fine Pam Bondi for every day that she’s not releasing these documents.”
Massie said the same: “The quickest way, and I think most expeditious way, to get justice for these victims is to bring inherent contempt against Pam Bondi.”
Khanna, meanwhile, was not done. This morning, he went on MS NOW’s Morning Joe and said that Republicans are telling him that they want Bondi out of office, and are hoping that Trump will serve as executioner in his typical way for those MAGA acolytes who fall from grace. If Trump doesn’t move, however, those Republicans are supposedly ready to take more concrete action than even holding Bondi in contempt of Congress.
“Massie and I, we went on TV yesterday morning and said we’re going to hold her in contempt,” said Khanna on the program. “And suddenly they start to scramble, they’re now releasing unredacted documents, they’re saying we’re going to release more documents—not because of Massie and me, but because they know Republicans themselves are upset at what Bondi has done. One Republican said—I don’t think Massie will mind my sharing this—my concern with you is that we want Donald Trump to fire Pam Bondi, so you don’t need to get involved. But Bondi has lost all credibility, and the survivors are not going away.”
If it does come to impeachment—and as always, that’s a big “if,” with our spineless career legislators—then Khanna says there are at least a handful of Republicans willing to come on board beyond Thomas Massie, enough to swing the narrow House of Representatives lean toward the GOP into a successful impeachment attempt.
When asked why this talk of impeachment was different, Khanna had this to say: “It’s different because it’s coming from Republicans, too. If it was just me out there or Robert Garcia out there, it would be seen as, OK, this is just a Democratic thing. This is going to be Thomas Massie leading it. There are a few Republicans who are on board with it. But we’re not going straight to impeachment. We’re starting with contempt. And the idea would be that you’d get a 30-day grace period, which is already in violation of the law, 30 day grace period to get the documents out.”
One has to think that the most likely outcome will be the Justice Department simply continuing to obfuscate and slowly release batches of seemingly random, redacted Epstein Files, while doing its best to minimize Trump’s exposure to the scandal. Will Congressional Republicans simply sit back and take it, like they’re so very prone to doing? Or will they sack up and make an example of Pam Bondi for demonstrable violations of a law signed by Trump himself? Maybe if we’re lucky, 2026 will be a year when impeachments are back in fashion.
