This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 7 episode of “Deadline: White House.”
On Tuesday, Pam Bondi made her first trip to Capitol Hill since becoming Donald Trump’s attorney general, appearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its annual oversight hearing. But what was supposed to be a routine hearing quickly turned contentious, with Bondi lashing out at several Democratic senators on the committee.
For over four hours, Trump’s former personal lawyer hit Democrats with what sounded like cheap opposition research. She called Sen. Adam Schiff of California “a liar” and “a failed lawyer” and asked him to “apologize” to the president for his work as an impeachment manager during Trump’s first term.
Bondi also baselessly claimed that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island took money from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s “closest confidants,” and she accused Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut of lying about his military record.
I served in the Senate and participated in many oversight hearings during my time there, and I’ve never seen anything like what we witnessed during Bondi’s testimony on Tuesday. I’ve never seen that kind of behavior from any witness, much less the sitting attorney general of the United States.
It was a shocking, ugly and frankly embarrassing display, but it wasn’t Bondi’s behavior that really stunned me. What truly shocked me is that no Republican on the committee, not even Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, spoke up when the attorney general of the United States spent the entirety of her questioning period with Democratic senators screaming, refusing to answer, and targeting them with ad hominem attacks.
That kind of behavior would not have been tolerated when I was in the United States Senate. There would have been a bipartisan effort to stop any witness who behaved like Bondi right in their tracks. But that’s how far the Republican Party has fallen under Trump.
Every member of that committee with an R next to their name should be ashamed. They are single-handedly, brick by brick, undoing the power of the Senate to have oversight and they are permanently impacting the ability of our democracy to function as our Founding Fathers intended it to.
