Bondi to Congress: 🖕

The attorney general came to the Hill to deliver a message to Democrats: Your ‘oversight’ couldn't matter to us less.

JVL fired off an emergency Triad last night on a breakpoint moment: the deployment of Texas National Guardsmen to Chicago, Illinois over the objections of state and local leaders. Make sure to give it a read.

Meanwhile, we’ve still got a few tickets left for our live show in D.C. tonight—we hope you’ll come breathe in the good vibes with us. Grab your tickets here. Happy Wednesday.

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U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on October 07, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The Brazenness Is the Point

by Andrew Egger

Let no one say Pam Bondi fails to understand her assignment. Donald Trump wants an attorney general who embraces the joint roles of presidential personal lawyer and histrionic TV-ready pundit. And when Bondi showed up to testify before the Senate Oversight Committee on Tuesday, she delivered on both fronts.

Not only did Bondi prove to be an unhelpful witness—answering question after question from Democratic senators with a repetition of canned non-answers or outright refusals to respond at all—she was also remarkably hostile. Throughout the hearing, she toggled rapidly between high-volume outrage and sneering contempt for committee Democrats—accusing Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of having been paid off by friends of Jeffrey Epstein, speculating about whether Sen. Mazie Hirono might be Antifa. It got so bad that poor Sen. Peter Welsh tried to preempt her by saying he was ready for whatever she had on his oppo file.

It would have been funny if not for the fact that this was serious business. Late in the hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff went back down the list of eleven topics on which Bondi had refused to give answers, including whether Border Czar Tom Homan had gotten to keep the $50,000 he was given in an FBI sting operation last year, whether Bondi discussed indicting former FBI Director James Comey with President Trump, and whether she fired career prosecutors for working on investigations related to January 6th. By the end of his remarks, he was struggling to be heard over a diatribe of outraged non sequiturs from Bondi: “Will you apologize to Donald Trump for trying to impeach him after you now know that Joe Biden tried to cover up Hunter Biden’s involvement with Ukraine?”

FBI Director Kash Patel is a twitchy little guy, but Bondi’s testimony made his appearances last month before a pair of congressional committees look downright professional. By the end, I was starting to wonder if we’d all been a little too hard on Matt Gaetz back when he was up for the job.

It was all, of course, pure audience-of-one stuff. Bondi was doing what she thought she had to do to get a pat on the head from “President” (as she calls him) later. But it’s worth pondering: Why was this the performance Trump was hoping to see?

There’s no reason, after all, why an AG as slavish as Bondi couldn’t at least pretend to maintain some semblance of impartiality during high-profile public appearances. She could pay lip service to the concept of Justice Department independence. She could answer (or dodge) Democrats’ questions more respectfully. When Sen. Dick Durbin asked who had signed the order to have the FBI flag any mentions of Trump in the Epstein files, it’s hard to imagine anyone but the biggest MAGA dead-enders finding her snide response compelling: “I’m not going to discuss anything about that with you, senator.”

A more measured approach may have actually served this administration well—at least down the road, should the balance of power change in Congress..

But that wasn’t the play the boss wanted to run. Bondi’s contemptuousness before the Senate Judiciary Committee was designed to send a clear message: You have no power to stop us.

Such a posture of utter refusal to even entertain the questions of committee Democrats—should have been cause for bipartisan scandal. But committee Republicans seemed perfectly uninterested in those questions, or in Bondi’s ridiculous manner of response. (They had their own axes to grind, after all—which Will Saletan covers down below.) The hour at which they might have protested against a Trump envoy’s scorn for their committee is long since past. And without any support from the majority, it doesn’t matter how brazenly Bondi makes a mockery of the very idea of congressional oversight of her work—all Democrats can do is post the clips online and register their outrage.

This is clearly the mask-off phase of Trump 2.0.¹ Trump doesn’t privately call Bondi to demand his enemies be prosecuted: He communicates the message via Truth Social. He doesn’t just denounce his Democratic opponents as weak on crime—he sends federal troops into their cities. He doesn’t just bring the nation’s generals together for a Team Trump pep rally—he uses that pep rally to preach his belief that Democratic electoral wins are illegitimate.

Trump is past triangulation. He’s past argumentation and persuasion. He’s in the raw-power business now. Pam Bondi went to Congress yesterday to let them know.

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Arctic Blast

by Will Saletan

To deflect scrutiny from Donald Trump’s corruption and Pam Bondi’s stonewalling, Republican senators have turned their fire on former Special Counsel Jack Smith.

“We saw Jack Smith weaponize the Justice Department against Donald Trump,” Bondi told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, in testimony that Andrew wrote about above. She dismissed Smith’s investigations as a failure, saying he “wasted $50 million . . . trying to put President Trump in jail.”

Chuck Grassley, the committee’s chairman, denounced Operation Arctic Frost—the preliminary FBI inquiry that led to Smith’s investigations—as “a political fishing expedition to get Trump at all costs, just like Crossfire Hurricane.”

The goal here is obvious. Republicans are trying to do to Smith’s investigations what they did to the Russia investigation: They’re trying to recast Trump as the victim.

In the face of so much lying, it’s sometimes hard to maintain your grip on reality. So let’s take a deep breath and remember what’s true: The Russia investigation confirmed that Trump and his associates solicited and exploited Russian assistance in the 2016 election. And Smith’s investigations—which ended because Trump captured the presidency, not because the evidence was ever refuted—thoroughly documented Trump’s obstruction of justice and his fraudulent schemes to overturn the 2020 election.

Go back and read Smith’s indictments and his final report. Unlike Trump’s laughably empty “indictment” of James Comey, Smith’s filings detail extensive evidence against Trump, from photographs to text messages to eyewitness accounts of the president’s attempts to corrupt subordinates.

It’s particularly rich to see Republican senators, in the Bondi hearing, accuse the FBI of “targeting Republican senators” by seeking their phone records in Operation Arctic Frost. (Sen. Josh Hawley falsely claimed that the FBI “tapped” their phones. What the bureau requested and got was metadata, such as records of which numbers were called in the days around January 6, 2021.)

One of the senators whose records the FBI sought, for example, was Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. On January 6th, Johnson’s office conspired—in a cloak-and-dagger operation captured on video—to relay phony slates of electors to then–Vice President Mike Pence. Text messages confirmed Johnson’s direct involvement in the scheme. So it’s a little hard to take seriously the indignation about targeting a “sitting United States senator.” Should the FBI have just ignored this?

For that matter, read Smith’s indictment in the fake-electors case. It described, based on eyewitness testimony, a December 2020 meeting in which Trump told Department of Justice leaders: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” Which congressmen? The House January 6^th Committee, in its report, named several and outlined their roles in the plot to overturn the election. Why would someone investigating that plot choose not to look into that?

The simple truth is that Trump is a criminal. He was convicted in one case and remains untried in three others. In two of those three cases—the fake-electors case and a related case in Georgia—the evidence indicates that he was assisted by Republican members of Congress.

Now he and his accomplices are back in power, and they’re using that power to smear the honest agents and prosecutors who investigated them. We shouldn’t be surprised. That’s what authoritarian regimes do: They rewrite the past.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Chicago Rubicon and What Comes Next… We aren’t at the worst-case scenario yet, writes JVL in an Emergency Triad, but if you squint, you can see it looming out there, just over the horizon.

• Democrats Are Winning the Shutdown Fight… Turns out Republicans still haven’t figured out the politics of health care, observes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.

• A Thirst for Decency… On Just Between Us, WILL SALETAN joins MONA CHAREN to talk about the Democrats’ healthcare message might just be working, and why the immigration “bloody shirt” may be losing its punch.

• We Hate Each Other More Than We Understand… MONA CHAREN writes on the perception gaps in our politics—which lead us to assume, for instance, that the “other side” is more radical and thirstier for violence than they really are.

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Quick Hits

MORE FACEPAINT FOR THE CLOWN SHOW: In Donald Trump’s mind, the criminal case against James Comey is obvious: Comey was a Deep Stater who helped launch the “Russia Russia Russia hoax” and is therefore “guilty as hell.” In an actual court, however, the prosecutors he ordered to indict Comey will have to prove he actually violated a federal law—in this case by making false statements to Congress. And it keeps getting clearer they haven’t got a case.

The gist of the charge against Comey, Trump’s Justice Department says, is that he lied to Congress when he told them years ago he had not authorized anyone to leak to the press on his behalf while serving as FBI Director. The prosecutors (whom Trump installed, remember, specifically to bring this case) say this is false, arguing that Comey authorized law professor Daniel Richman to leak to the media. But there’s a problem: Richman is apparently prepared to testify the opposite. Here’s ABC News:

Federal prosecutors investigating former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly making false statements to Congress determined that a central witness in their probe would prove “problematic” and likely prevent them from establishing their case to a jury, sources familiar with their findings told ABC News. . . .

When prosecutors met with Richman in September, he told them that he never served as an anonymous source for Comey or acted at Comey’s direction while he was FBI director, sources familiar with his interview told ABC News. In at least two cases when Richman asked if he should speak with the press, Comey advised him not to do so, sources said.

Investigators who reviewed material from Comey’s emails, including his correspondence with Richman, could not identify an instance when Comey approved leaking material to a reporter anonymously, sources told ABC News.

The fact that Trump’s case against Comey is deeply, ridiculously flawed doesn’t make it less dangerous, of course. Getting indicted is no joke—Comey’s life has already been upended in significant ways even if prosecutors can’t make anything stick. And there may be more of these prosecutions coming. Trump plainly craves an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the clock is running out to seek one against former CIA Director John Brennan: the five-year statute of limitations for a comparable false-charges indictment for him would expire tomorrow.

Still, we should be heartened to see the engine falling out of the case against Comey before it’s even left the garage.

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GRIFTRX: Another Wall Street Journal dispatch from the Department of Stories that Would Cause Major Scandal in Normal Times But Which We Now Barely Have Time Even to Acknowledge Quickly Here:

The country’s top drugmakers are set to meet in early December at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown with Donald Trump Jr. and senior Trump administration officials that regulate the pharmaceutical industry.

The host: BlinkRx, an online prescription drug delivery company that this year installed Trump Jr. as a board member. The summit will conclude with a dinner at the Executive Branch, the exclusive new club founded by Trump Jr. and his close friends, according to people with knowledge of the event and a copy of the invitation viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

BlinkRx stands to benefit from a shake-up of how patients buy drugs after President Trump urged pharmaceutical companies to sell their medicines directly to consumers. BlinkRx helps drugmakers do exactly that with a service that promises to set up direct-to-patient sales programs in as little as three weeks. TrumpRx, a new government website set to launch in early 2026, would funnel patients to direct-sale sites.

The Journal goes on to note that BlinkRx seems to have had advance notice that TrumpRx was coming: “Days before the president announced the new TrumpRx website, a BlinkRx representative told one drug company that BlinkRx could be involved with running the site on behalf of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services.” Just how big a federal contract goes to BlinkRx, if any, will be a fascinating measure of how much corruption this White House thinks is palatable with the public. And it raises the question: If you’re a company with industry interests before the administration, why wouldn’t you be lining up to get Trump Jr. on your board?

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ANOTHER HOSTAGE TO SHOOT: The cartoon-villain “reopen the government OR ELSE!” threats keep coming. Donald Trump suggested yesterday that some federal employees currently furloughed due to the shutdown may not receive their back pay: “We’ll take care of our people,” the president told reporters. “But there are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them a different way.”

Under a 2019 law Trump himself signed, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, states that furloughed workers “must be compensated on the earliest date possible after the lapse ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates, and subject to the enactment of appropriations Acts ending the lapse.” But the White House has been circulating a memo this week trying to introduce the concept of a little wiggle room, arguing that “subject to the enactment of appropriations” doesn’t just mean “once the government reopens,” but “only if Congress specifically appropriates money for that back pay.”

“Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically?” a senior White House official told Axios. “The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn’t.”

Advocates for federal workers, perhaps unsurprisingly, have condemned this argument as legislative gobbledygook. “There is no legal authority to support that interpretation of the statute,” labor attorney Nekeisha Campbell told Axios. And if they need backup, they don’t have to dig deep into the archives. Last month, the administration’s own Office of Personnel Management posted guidance that furloughed workers would receive backpay. This month, the White House Council of Economy Advisers put out a memo saying federal workers (though not contractors) were “entitled” to backpay. And House Speaker Mike Johnson’s own website currently says that, “Under federal law, employees are entitled to back pay upon the government reopening.”

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Cheap Shots

Hot off the presses this morning:

1. A phase that corresponds, oddly enough, to the mask-on phase of federal law enforcement tactics.