The moment you realized the hearing had gone off the rails wasn’t when the shouting started. It was when the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, leaned into her microphone and, in a packed House committee room, yelled at a senior Democrat: “You washed up loser lawyer.”
On the wall behind her, the Great Seal. In the gallery above, several women who say they were trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, standing in silence to watch a government that had failed them try — at least on paper — to explain itself. Instead, they got Pam Bondi on a full-volume tear.
Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee session was supposed to be dry and uncomfortable: a straight oversight hearing on how the Department of Justice has handled the Epstein files and the lingering question of why so few of the disgraced financier’s alleged co‑conspirators have ever faced charges.
Instead, the proceeding devolved with startling speed into something closer to a televised shouting match. Pam Bondi, flanked by Republican allies, oscillated between grievance, deflection and open contempt for the Democrats questioning her. The phrase “yelling spree” doesn’t feel like hyperbole; it reads like a basic description of what unfolded.
BREAKING: Pam Bondi appears to have just committed a federal crime by lying under oath. @tedlieu just caught her in a lie and called for her resignation live on TV. pic.twitter.com/IioPQawCUS
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) February 11, 2026
The fuse was lit early, during an exchange with Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington. Jayapal did something both theatrical and, given who was in the room, entirely understandable: she asked Bondi to turn around and apologize directly to the Epstein survivors seated behind her for the DOJ’s “absolutely unacceptable” handling of the case files.
It was a made‑for‑camera moment, sure. It was also a demand for basic human acknowledgment.
Pam Bondi wanted no part of it. She dismissed the request as “theatrics” and flatly refused to engage. When Jayapal pressed — would the Attorney General at least admit the release of the files had been mishandled? — Pam Bondi lunged for the familiar refuge of whataboutism.
“Congresswoman, you sat before — [Former AG] Merrick Garland sat in this chair twice,” she said, trying to drag the timeline back to her predecessor and away from her own tenure.
What followed was a procedural car crash. Every time Jayapal tried to “reclaim my time,” the standard way members reassert control of their questioning, Pam Bondi talked right through her. Committee chair Jim Jordan abandoned any pretense of neutrality, insisting that Bondi could answer “in the way they want to answer,” effectively blessing the filibuster.
Pam Bondi takes the walk of shame, refuses to meet with Epstein survivors, does not answer questions about redactions, and stays quiet when asked about high-profile arrests. pic.twitter.com/pofAyJRUHi
— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) February 11, 2026
The visual was brutal. Survivors watching from the gallery; a congresswoman asking the country’s top law‑enforcement official to face them and apologize; that official refusing even to turn her head, declaring, “I won’t get into the gutter for her theatrics,” while simultaneously raising her voice and dragging the exchange deeper into the muck.
If the clash with Jayapal was tense, the back‑and‑forth with veteran New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler and ranking member Jamie Raskin tipped the entire hearing into farce.
Nadler tried, with lawyerly patience, to get to the substance: how many of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged accomplices are actually under active investigation? Have any indictments been prepared? It wasn’t a trick question.
Pam Bondi barely let him finish. “I’m gonna answer the question the way I want to answer the question,” she snapped, again dismissing the entire line of inquiry as “ridiculous” theatrics. It is rare to see an Attorney General show this level of naked hostility toward the very committee that controls her budget. Bondi looked less like a cornered official than a pundit who’d been booked on the wrong cable show.
🚨 Rep Massie after today’s AG Pam Bondi hearing
“The next attorney general can bring charges against them for breaking the law.
Now they’re claiming their defense is incompetence for why they haven’t given us all the documents they should and why they failed to redact the… pic.twitter.com/7RG5loB7Vc
— Red Panda Koala (@RedPandaKoala) February 11, 2026
Raskin stepped in, asking the chair to give Nadler an extra 45 seconds to make up for Bondi’s interruptions, which he politely but accurately described as a “filibuster.” He also reminded Bondi that she’d been warned before the hearing not to chew up members’ limited time with speeches.
That’s when the mask really slipped.
“I told you about that, Attorney General, before you started,” Raskin said.
“You don’t tell me anything,” Pam Bondi shot back, voice rising. “You washed up loser lawyer.”
For a beat, the room fell quiet. This was not an activist yelling from the back row or a red‑faced backbencher playing to the cheap seats. It was the chief law‑enforcement officer of the United States hurling playground insults at a sitting member of Congress — in front of women who had been trafficked as teenagers, who had waited years to hear how their abuser’s network might finally be held to account.
If there was any awareness of that obscenity, it didn’t show. Once a Republican colleague reclaimed time on her behalf, Pam Bondi settled back into her talking points, insisting that the newfound bipartisan interest in Epstein was really a Democratic distraction from “the economic success” of the Donald Trump administration.
Pam Bondi goes on a completely unhinged rant about the stock market when asked why she has not indicted any clients of Jeffrey Epstein.
Bondi says all Americans need to focus on other topics, like the economy, and not on Jeffrey Epstein’s child trafficking network.
“That’s what… pic.twitter.com/zwbtd3lkoH
— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) February 11, 2026
Pam Bondi’s defense was jarring not just for its content, but for its sheer irrelevance. Asked about missing indictments and redacted files, she talked about the stock market. Pushed on why survivors still don’t have clear answers, she pivoted to the S&P 500.
She also complained that “none of them asked Merrick Garland” about Epstein when he held the job — a line that might have landed if there weren’t video archives of Democrats grilling Garland on everything from non‑prosecution agreements to the original sweetheart deal in Florida.
Taken together, the performance said the quiet part out loud: under Pam Bondi, the Justice Department’s instinct on Jeffrey Epstein is still to minimize, deflect and, when cornered, lash out, rather than to walk Congress or the public through what is being done to pursue the powerful men who orbited him.
There was something especially grotesque about watching this play out with survivors physically present in the room. Their very existence is the reason the hearing was happening at all. Their presence should have anchored the tone — forced everyone involved to speak like adults about an adult horror.
Instead, they were reduced to background extras in a Beltway shouting match. The most senior law‑enforcement official in the country couldn’t bring herself to look them in the eye, let alone offer the apology a member of Congress had to beg for.
It’s tempting to treat Pam Bondi’s yelling spree as another viral moment in a capital that now seems addicted to them — fresh fodder for partisan feeds, another clip to splice into attack ads. That would be a mistake.
What happened in that room went beyond bad manners. It was a preview of what accountability looks like when an administration is more invested in culture‑war combat than in answering basic questions about how a serial sex trafficker and the people around him were allowed to operate for so long.
In theory, oversight hearings exist to shed light on dark places. On Wednesday, the light barely made it past the witness table.
