Former Attorney General Pam Bondi sat for a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee on Friday and acknowledged that the Justice Department made "redaction errors" during its release of millions of pages of Jeffrey Epstein files, but placed the blame squarely on Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the man who now runs the department she left two months ago.
The admission, delivered in a transcribed but unsworn session that Democrats protested was neither videotaped nor conducted under oath, marks the first time Bondi has publicly conceded specific failures in a process she once promised would bring full transparency to one of the most disturbing sex-trafficking cases in American history.
USA Today reported that Bondi told lawmakers she had delegated oversight of the document review to Blanche and did not personally conduct it. In her opening statement, she framed the release as "an enormously complicated and labor-intensive process" involving roughly 3 million documents, a stack she once compared to the height of the Eiffel Tower.
The gap between what the administration promised and what it delivered is worth tracing carefully. In February 2025, Bondi told Fox News viewers to expect action. "You're going to see some Epstein information being released by my office," she said. That same month, White House Counselor Alina Habba told Piers Morgan that criminal prosecutions were coming.
"Absolutely. To hide lists, to protect political friends, all of that, we don't have time for that."
By March 2025, Bondi was on Sean Hannity's show, raising the stakes further: "It's a new day, it's a new administration, and everything's going to come out to the public."
What came out, when it finally arrived in late January 2026, was a mess. The Justice Department released approximately 3.5 million pages of Epstein files. But it withheld another 2.5 million pages. Much of what it did release was heavily redacted. And some of the material that went public included the names of accusers and, in some cases, nude images of potential victims, precisely the kind of information Congress had required the DOJ to protect.
The New York Post reported that roughly 7,000 of the 3.5 million released documents were flagged for victim privacy concerns, and the department temporarily removed approximately 9,500 documents subject to protective orders in the Ghislaine Maxwell case. Victims' names and identifying information had been scattered throughout the release despite the congressional mandate to redact them.
Annie Farmer, an Epstein victim advocate, captured the scale of the failure in stark terms: "If you see some of these documents where there will be a list of 50 names and one is redacted, you know, there's just no explanation for how it could have been done so poorly."
Bondi's central argument before the committee was straightforward delegation. She told lawmakers:
"As the head of a large department with broad responsibilities, I did not lead every aspect of this effort or conduct that document review myself. I delegated oversight over this process to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche."
She then acknowledged the failures without accepting personal responsibility: "There were redaction errors. But since day one of this process, this department has been committed to accountability and transparency."
The Washington Examiner noted that Bondi told lawmakers she didn't lead every aspect of the Epstein files review, reinforcing her posture of distance from the operational details. She claimed the DOJ had "produced everything required" by the Epstein Files Transparency Act and that staffers did "our very best in the time frame allotted by the legislation to protect victims."
When confronted at an earlier hearing on February 11, Bondi had offered a similar line: "If you brought us a victim's name that was inadvertently released, we immediately redacted it." The problem, of course, is that the names should never have been released in the first place.
The frustration over the DOJ's handling of the Epstein files has not broken neatly along party lines. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, confronted Bondi at the February 11 hearing with language that left no room for ambiguity:
"This is bigger than Watergate. This, this goes over four administrations. This cover-up spans decades, and you are responsible for this portion of it."
That kind of pressure from within the president's own party is not typical, and it helps explain why the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Bondi in the first place. She was originally scheduled for a mid-April deposition. But after President Trump fired her on April 2, reportedly in part over frustration with her handling of the Epstein files, the Justice Department said she no longer had to comply with the subpoena.
Democrats cried foul. Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the committee's ranking member, argued that a transcribed interview was a weaker format that allowed Bondi to refuse questions without providing any legal justification, a protection not available in a sworn deposition.
"We continue to be incredibly disappointed of the decision to not have this interview videotaped and then released to the American public. It should be under oath and it should be videotaped."
During a break in the questioning Friday, Garcia told reporters that Bondi had "pushed all of the investigation and the blame on Acting AG Todd Blanche." Bondi fired back on social media, posting that she had "praised Acting AG Blanche's management of this Herculean task." The distinction between praise and blame-shifting was, to put it mildly, unclear.
Committee Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, told reporters outside the hearing room that the transcript would be released promptly. "You'll know everything that's been asked," he said.
Beyond the redaction failures lies a deeper question: what did the DOJ actually do with the Epstein files once it had them?
In July 2025, the department released a memo stating that it had conducted a "systematic review" of the files and found "no incriminating list of Epstein clients." The memo said Epstein had more than 1,000 victims but concluded that "no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted." The DOJ announced it was essentially closing the case.
Blanche himself said on January 30 that "if we had information... about men who abused women, we would prosecute them." He also acknowledged that the department withheld documents for reasons the law didn't permit, including to shield internal DOJ deliberations related to Epstein. That admission alone should have triggered deeper congressional scrutiny.
Rep. Summer Lee, a Pennsylvania Democrat, pointed to what she saw as a double standard. She noted that the United Kingdom had made arrests based on information contained in the DOJ's own file releases, while the American department that held those files for years took no new enforcement action. "People in America are tired of seeing that two-tiered system of justice," Lee told USA Today in March.
Meanwhile, Epstein's own accountant and lawyer told Congress that the DOJ never once questioned them, a fact that raises its own uncomfortable questions about how thorough any "systematic review" really was.
Trump removed Bondi on April 2, and the circumstances behind that decision reportedly included frustration with her management of the Epstein disclosure. In the weeks since, Bondi has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
She reportedly told Trump in May that his name appeared multiple times in the Epstein files. Trump and Epstein were personal friends until the 2000s, though the president has always denied wrongdoing. By mid-July, Trump was urging supporters to move past the issue entirely, posting on Truth Social: "Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax."
Democrats, for their part, introduced at least two impeachment measures against Bondi, H.Res. 1105 and H.Res. 1119, accusing her of failing Epstein's victims. Those resolutions have gone nowhere in a Republican-controlled House.
Epstein survivor Danielle Bensky gathered outside the hearing room Friday and expressed a frustration that cut across partisan lines: "We just wish that more Republicans would get on the same page with us. There's something called subtext."
Newsmax reported that Bondi refused to answer questions about Trump's involvement in the Epstein files release. When asked whether the president had knowledge of Epstein's crimes, Bondi said she was "not certain of the extent of his knowledge." Rep. Dave Min, a California Democrat, was blunter about the session: "It's a sham in there. They are not answering any questions."
The pattern here is familiar and dispiriting. A sex trafficker with more than 1,000 victims. A trove of 6 million pages of files. Bold promises of transparency from the nation's top law enforcement officials. And then: botched redactions that exposed the very victims Congress sought to protect, millions of pages withheld, documents shielded for legally impermissible reasons, zero new prosecutions, and a former attorney general who says she handed the whole thing off to her deputy.
Bondi's tenure grew increasingly embattled as the Epstein controversy deepened, and her Friday appearance did little to resolve the core questions. The committee's decision to release the transcript will at least put her answers on the record. Whether those answers satisfy anyone, survivors, lawmakers, or the public, is another matter.
The Oversight Committee's sustained pressure on this issue deserves credit regardless of which party is driving it. Epstein's victims have waited years for a reckoning that keeps getting postponed by institutional inertia, bureaucratic excuse-making, and political convenience.
More than 1,000 victims. Zero new prosecutions. And the person who ran the Justice Department says she delegated the job. At some point, delegation stops being management and starts being evasion.
