On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi was photographed with a record of Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s search history of the unredacted Epstein documents — apparently made possible by monitoring activity on the Justice Department’s four secure portals.
As MS NOW recounted, Bondi more frequently resorted to canned insults, courtesy of a briefing notebook she kept at ready for lawmaker targets, insted of answering lawmakers' questions.
Jayapal, a Democrat who demanded Bondi apologize to Epstein victims for not meeting with them or pursuing their complaints during Wednesday's House Judiciary Committee hearing, confirmed that the documents Bondi had flagged were, “in fact, the ones she had viewed at the DOJ.” She also said that for the attorney general to have that kind of information, it amounted to “surveilling members.”
But MS NOW reports when confronted with Bondi’s clear intent to exploit federal websites to gather info for her “burn book,” many Republicans had no comment. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) argued that it was “pretty rich” to hear Democrats complain about surveillance “after what the DOJ has done to Republican members of Congress under Jack Smith.”
“As part of Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the FBI collected the phone ‘toll records’ — metadata showing who called whom, when and for how long — of more than a dozen Republicans,” MS NOW reported. But the difference in Smith’s investigation is that Smith obtained grand jury subpoenas to collect that information, whereas Bondi has revealed no such affidavit. Additionally, there was no rule blocking Smith from also scoping the toll records of Democrats, if there was suspicion of them having aided President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Additionally, Smith is not a Democrat, but a registered independent. Still, Republican lawmakers objected that they weren’t notified by Smith, and they accused the DOJ of weaponization.
“But Jordan saw little problem with [Bondi and] the DOJ effectively spying on lawmakers in this instance,” reports MS NOW. “Asked what he would say to Republicans who are concerned about the DOJ collecting information about Epstein document searches, he said he would say ‘the same thing to them that I just said.’”
MS NOW also reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was also more equivocal, despite championing a provision to allow himself and other lawmakers to sue the DOJ for up to $500,000 for accessing the phone records.
Graham told reporters that he wasn’t sure whether the DOJ keeping track of what Epstein documents lawmakers look at was out of line, but hastened to say: “Getting my phone records was out of line.”
Democrats, however, remain furious.
“It’s totally inappropriate,” Jayapal told MS NOW in a phone interview. “Is this the whole reason they opened [the files] up to us two days early? So they could essentially surveil members to see what we were going to ask her about?”