There was a moment during Attorney General Pam Bondi’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this week when the sheer alchemy of Trump-era cognitive dissonance reached its peak. Seated before eleven survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking operation—women who had traveled to Washington specifically to watch the Department of Justice answer for accidentally publishing their nude photographs alongside the unredacted names of their abusers—Bondi was asked a simple question.
What was the Justice Department doing to investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators?
The attorney general did not answer. Instead, she began extolling the virtues of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had recently surpassed 50,000 .
If you are struggling to connect the market performance of publicly traded companies to the question “How many of Epstein’s associates have you indicted?”—congratulations. You still possess a working sense of cause and effect. Pam Bondi does not. Or perhaps more accurately, Pam Bondi possesses a keener sense than any of us realized: the cause is protecting the powerful; the effect is that her boss tweets approvingly.
The Gutter Is Where Victims Sit
Let us set the scene. Representative Pramila Jayapal asked the survivors in the audience to stand and raise their hands if they had not yet been contacted by the Justice Department. All eleven raised their hands . Jayapal then requested that Bondi turn around, face the women, and apologize for her department releasing their personal information—in some cases revealing to their own families for the first time that they had been trafficked as minors.
Bondi refused.
“I’m not going to get in the gutter with these theatrics,” she sneered .
Let us pause to appreciate the geography of Bondi’s moral universe. The gutter, in her estimation, is located somewhere behind her chair. The gutter is where you go when you acknowledge the existence of people who were raped as children. The gutter is where you find yourself if you dare to turn around and say “We harmed you further.” The gutter, apparently, is within eyeshot of the Epstein survivors.
Pam Bondi, by contrast, remained firmly on the high ground—facing forward, pointing her finger at Democratic members of Congress, and reviewing the binder of opposition research her staff had helpfully compiled so she could insult lawmakers by referencing specific unsealed indictments in their districts .
An Audience of One
The theory that Bondi is simply performing incompetence misses the point. As Mary Trump noted, Bondi is doing exactly what she was hired to do . The Department of Justice is not, at present, in the business of investigating powerful men who may have trafficked minors. It is, however, in the business of investigating the six Democratic lawmakers who filmed a video reminding military service members they can refuse illegal orders—a prosecution so legally dubious that a grand jury rejected it within hours .
Zero Epstein co-conspirators indicted. Zero perpetrators named. Zero apologies issued.
But six Trump critics aggressively pursued. The math is not complicated.
When Representative Jerry Nadler pressed Bondi on the zero number, she began shouting that she would “answer the question the way I want to answer the question” . What followed was less a testimony than a venting session. Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor, was informed he is a “washed-up loser lawyer” who is “not even a lawyer” . Representative Becca Balint, whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, was accused of voting against an antisemitism resolution . Representative Dan Goldman was reminded that he failed to impeach Donald Trump in 2016—which would be a remarkable feat of time travel even for a Democratic congressman .
The insults were not spontaneous. They were prepared. Republican Representative Thomas Massie observed that Bondi arrived armed with “flashcards” of prewritten attacks . She came to Congress less as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and more as a guest on a particularly hostile cable news panel, equipped with zingers and utterly devoid of answers.
The Stock Market Does Not Care About Your Trauma
But let us return to the Dow, because Bondi clearly wants us there. It is her safe space.
“The DOW is over 50,000 dollars,” she declared, apparently unaware that the Dow measures corporate equity, not the safety of children. “The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about” .
Representative Jamie Raskin was, by all accounts, laughing. Bondi was not amused. “I hear you’re a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin,” she snapped .
It is worth noting here that Bondi was not, technically, wrong about the numbers. The Dow did close above 50,000. The Nasdaq did hit record highs. These facts are simply irrelevant to the question of whether her department is actively protecting men who participated in the sexual abuse of minors. But relevance, like the gutter, is behind her.
The truly stunning aspect of this exchange was not the non sequitur itself but the aggression with which Bondi defended it. When members began whispering to one another, visibly confused, she demanded: “What does the DOW have to do with anything? That’s what they just asked? Are you kidding?” .
Yes, attorney general. That is what they just asked. They are not kidding. The women seated behind you are not kidding. The families who learned of their daughters’ abuse through your department’s careless redactions are not kidding.
The Binder of Many Colors
Throughout the hearing, Bondi clutched a large binder, which she repeatedly slammed open and referenced as though it contained the nuclear codes. At one point, Representative Jared Moskowitz requested she “flip to the Jared Moskowitz section” so he could see what opposition research his colleagues had compiled .
The binder, it seems, contained everything except information about Jeffrey Epstein’s associates. It contained crime statistics. It contained stock prices. It contained, apparently, the search histories of Democratic members of Congress who had visited the DOJ facility to review unredacted documents—a fact Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described as “deeply, deeply disturbing” .
It did not contain a single indictment for anyone connected to Epstein’s trafficking network.
Bondi’s defense, offered repeatedly, was that former Attorney General Merrick Garland also failed to prosecute these individuals. This is technically true. It is also, as Representative Thomas Massie pointed out, not a defense. “This is bigger than Watergate. This goes over four administrations,” Massie said. “You don’t have to go back to Biden. Let’s go back to Obama. Let’s go back to George Bush. This cover-up spans decades, and you are responsible for this portion of it” .
To which Bondi replied that Massie suffers from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” .
The Conservative Backlash
Perhaps the most telling indicator of Bondi’s performance was the response from her own side. Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, posted that Bondi should be fired or resign . Kyle Rittenhouse, who knows something about controversial public appearances, demanded her replacement . Tim Pool, the pro-Trump podcaster, admitted: “I think they’ve miserably handled the Epstein files” .
Nick Fuentes, never one for understatement, called for impeachment .
When the MAGA ecosystem turns on you, it is not because you have failed to prosecute Epstein’s associates. It is because you have failed to convincingly pretend you are trying. Bondi promised a client list. She delivered redacted emails and accidentally exposed victims. She fanned conspiracy theories and then admitted, months later, that no such list ever existed .
The binders she distributed to influencers at the White House last year contained nothing new. The files she released contained nothing new. The performance this week contained nothing new—except, perhaps, a clearer view of the strategy.
Cover-Up as Performance Art
The Morning Joe panel, hardly an objective source but nonetheless capable of basic pattern recognition, spent Thursday morning dissecting Bondi’s testimony with the appropriate disgust. Joe Scarborough, who claims to know Bondi personally, described the hearing as “one of the saddest, most pitiful, just cringe-inducing performances in Capitol Hill history” .
He then performed the math that Bondi refuses to do: “She was asked, ‘Are you going to start protecting these women who were raped as young girls? Are you going to start arresting the men, the powerful and rich men who you’re protecting right now, who raped these young girls?’ And she responded by saying—didn’t talk about the raped girls, didn’t talk about the rich and powerful men who were evading justice because of her and because of this administration—she said what we really should be talking about, not the raped girls, not the rich and powerful men, but what we should really be talking about is the Dow Industrial” .
Mika Brzezinski requested the producers display the image of Bondi refusing to turn around. “She decided to turn her back on victims of repeated sexual abuse, some of them at the time in their lives when they were children. That right there is who Pam Bondi is now” .
The Enduring Mystery
We are left, then, with two questions.
First: Who is being protected? Bondi will not say. Her binder will not say. The redactions, now being reviewed for “errors,” presumably conceal something or someone or multiple someones. The Commerce Secretary, who claimed he last saw Epstein in 2005, was photographed taking his family to Epstein’s island in 2012. No investigation. Nothing happens .
Second: What, exactly, does the Dow have to do with any of this?
The answer, I suspect, is nothing. And everything. The stock market is Bondi’s incantation, her magic spell, her attempt to transmute the base metal of unanswered questions into the gold of presidential approval. She cannot tell you why her department refuses to arrest Epstein’s associates. She cannot tell you why victims’ names were published. She cannot tell you why eleven women traveled to Washington and were met with her shoulder blades.
But she can tell you the Nasdaq is smashing records.
It is not an answer. It is not even a deflection, really—deflection implies a target, a movement away from something toward something else. Bondi is not moving toward anything. She is simply shouting numbers at the void, hoping the void gets distracted.
The void, this week, did not cooperate. The survivors raised their hands. The cameras captured her refusal to face them. The clip of her screaming about the Dow while being asked about child rape has been viewed millions of times.
Pam Bondi will not be fired. She will not resign. She will continue to serve her audience of one, clutching her binder, pointing her finger, keeping the gutter firmly behind her.
But the women are still standing there. Their hands are still raised. And no amount of stock market chatter will make them lower them.