Jimmy Kimmel boiled the Epstein files down to a single question on Wednesday night. The late-night host spoke about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s congressional hearing, where she kept dodging questions about redactions in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Lawmakers who have reviewed the unredacted documents have said that names of non-victims (including President Donald Trump’s) were blacked out. Yet, the assurance was that only victims’ identities would be shielded.
Speaking of Bondi, Kimmel said, “This is the kind of woman who, if you lived next door to her, you’d move. You wouldn’t even argue with her. You’d just relocate and never go back to the block.”
Bondi’s testimony stretched for well above four hours, as she clashed with both Democrats and Republicans.
Then, rather than addressing the redactions, she repeatedly praised Trump as the “most transparent president in the nation’s history” and boasted about the stock market. “The Dow is over 50,000 right now,” she insisted, as the room laughed.
An image we won’t soon forget. Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to look at Epstein survivors pictured behind her on the Hill today. pic.twitter.com/KYCBQCXz3Y
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) February 11, 2026
Kimmel seized that moment. “That’s right,” he said, “[Trump] is so transparent, you had to black out his name like a thousand times.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin reviewed the unredacted files, and he agrees that Trump’s name appears more than a million times. Kimmel amplified that claim in his monologue, as that doesn’t even include the millions of pages still unreleased.
“Popping up a million times isn’t a positive for the Pizzagate party,” Kimmel cracked. “With your cooperation and the cooperation of others, will hereafter be known as the Trump Epstein files,” he joked. “[Has] a nice ring to it.”
He referenced that Bondi once claimed Epstein’s client list was sitting on her desk. Now he asked if that list vanished into a sea of redactions. At one point, Bondi had also accused lawmakers of “Trump derangement syndrome.”
Kimmel sarcastically said, “The ultra-conservative congressman from Kentucky who endorsed Donald Trump three times has Trump derangement syndrome.”
He also said the redaction controversy was like a five-year-old hiding a lollipop behind their back.
Bondi Explains She Was Going To Release The Epstein Files But Then Some Pedophiles Asked Her Not To https://t.co/UrrVsBPpbi pic.twitter.com/aEH9RsWaep
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 8, 2025
Then Kimmel asked, “This Department of Justice is hiding the names of people who are not victims. Why are they doing that? If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding names? That’s it. That’s the only question anybody needs to ask.”
And no, Bondi did not directly address why non-victim names were redacted. Instead, at one point, she told a lawmaker, “Don’t yell at me.” At another, she insisted, “This isn’t a circus. This is a hearing.”
Meanwhile, in Europe, several officials have stepped down over associations tied to Epstein’s network. Jimmy Kimmel compared that with the American political response, as it looks very different from the one at home.
