The U.S. attorney general has traditionally been known as “the people’s lawyer.” Attorney General Pam Bondi, however, has gone out of her way to position herself as Donald Trump’s lawyer.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held its annual Justice Department oversight hearing on Tuesday, and over the course of several hours, the nation’s chief law enforcement official put on an exceedingly unusual display. There have been plenty of tense exchanges between Justice Department officials and the panel’s members over the years, but it’s difficult to think of a comparable example of an attorney general showing outright contempt and disgust for senators from the opposing party.

Bondi was, in roughly equal measure, combative, unprofessional and brazenly partisan, acting more like an employee of the president’s super PAC and less like an attorney general. At one point, she even pressed Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff to “apologize” to Trump for his first term impeachments, for reasons Bondi didn’t even try to explain.

But it was the same California senator who also used the opportunity to share some of the receipts he’d collected over the course of the proceedings. As The New Republic noted:

Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California took Attorney General Pam Bondi to task Tuesday for her incessant deflections and evasions throughout a Senate judiciary hearing. Bondi had verbally attacked Democratic senators throughout the hearing rather than answer their questions. Schiff was, evidently, keeping track of questions Bondi left unanswered, and he ran through the lengthy (yet inexhaustive) list.

It was arguably the most memorable exchange of the frustrating hearing.

As Schiff documented, Bondi refused to respond to all kinds of legitimate lines of inquiry, including:

• whether the attorney general consulted with career ethics lawyers before approving a $400 million gift from Qatar (a country she was a paid lobbyist for);
• what role she played in asking that Trump’s name be flagged in the Jeffrey Epstein files;
• whether White House border czar Tom Homan took the $50,000 from undercover FBI agents in the run-up to the 2024 election;
• whether career prosecutors found insufficient evidence to charge former FBI Director James Comey;
• whether Bondi discussed the Comey indictment with Trump;
• how the administration concluded that military strikes against civilians in international waters are legal;
• whether Bondi approved the firing of antitrust lawyers who disagreed with the Hewlett Packard merger;
• whether she supported a fund for violent insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6;
• whether the Justice Department had fired career professionals because they worked on Jan. 6 cases;
• and whether DOJ employees should have to abide by court orders.

In effectively all of these instances, the attorney general could’ve offered substantive answers. She instead attacked senators for asking good questions she didn’t like.

“This is supposed to be an oversight hearing of the Justice Department, and it comes in the wake of an indictment called for by the president of one of his enemies,” Schiff explained. “This is supposed to be an oversight hearing, and it comes in the wake of revelations that a top administration official took $50,000 in a bag, and this department made that investigation go away. This is supposed to be an oversight hearing, when dozens of prosecutors have been fired simply because they worked on cases investigating the former president. … This is supposed to be an oversight hearing in which members of Congress can get serious answers to serious questions.”

Bondi tried to interrupt the Californian as he presented his case, but she couldn’t stop the truth.