The name Jeffrey Epstein still hangs over Washington like a bad smell. Years after his death in a New York jail cell, the question of who helped him, who protected him and who quietly looked the other way continues to stalk the corridors of power.
On Wednesday morning, that unresolved fury found a new target: Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Dragged before the House Judiciary Committee for what was nominally a routine oversight hearing on the Department of Justice, Bondi was instead met with a barrage of accusations that the Trump administration has been engaged in an 'Epstein cover-up' — sitting on crucial files, blacking out names and shielding powerful men from scrutiny.
What might have been a dry procedural session became something closer to a reckoning.
Pam Bondi, Epstein Files And The Shadow Over The DOJ
Bondi arrived on Capitol Hill knowing Epstein's name would come up. The Justice Department had, after all, released its final batch of Epstein-related documents only weeks earlier — documents so heavily redacted that entire pages were reduced to blocks of black ink.
Behind closed doors, lawmakers were finally allowed to see unredacted material earlier this week. Instead of putting doubts to rest, that glimpse appears to have done the opposite. It raised new questions about who knew what, when, and whether the department Bondi now leads has truly been willing to hold everyone to account.
That is the context in which Democrats accused her of presiding over an 'Epstein cover-up'. The phrase is politically loaded, of course, but it captures a broader unease: that the justice system still bends around the wealthy and well-connected, even in a case as grotesque as Epstein's.
Bondi, a former Florida attorney general with long-standing ties to Donald Trump, pushed back on the suggestion that she or her agency were protecting anyone. She insisted the DOJ's investigation into Epstein's network had been 'thorough' and 'independent', and that redactions were necessary to shield victims and ongoing probes.
But redactions can hide a multitude of sins. Without names, timelines and handwritten notes, it is hard for the public — or even members of Congress — to see who was in Epstein's orbit and how deep the rot went. That opacity is precisely what fuels the 'cover-up' charge. It may not be fair to pin decades of institutional failure entirely on Bondi, but she now holds the office that must answer for it.
There is a broader discomfort here that cannot be dismissed as partisan theatre. Epstein is not just another scandal; he is shorthand for a system that failed the vulnerable and insulated the powerful. When the final word on his case still looks like a patchwork of black rectangles, suspicion will fill the gaps.
Pam Bondi, DHS Funding And A Clash Over ICE
Almost in parallel with the Epstein row, another fight was playing out just down the corridor — this time over money, borders and a Department of Homeland Security days away from running out of funding.
Senate Democrats have made it plain they will not support a stopgap bill that simply keeps DHS ticking over beyond the 13 February deadline. For them, the issue is not the calendar, but what the department has become under Trump: a machine of immigration raids, deportations and, in their view, barely checked violence.
'We're 3 days away from a DHS shutdown and Republicans have not gotten serious about negotiating a solution that reins in ICE and stops the violence,' Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said. 'Democrats will not support a CR to extend the status quo.'
While Bondi was being grilled on justice, a separate House hearing was supposed to be confronting the human cost of that 'status quo'. Instead, it turned into its own minor spectacle.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not show up. Nor did senior officials from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — the very agencies at the heart of the storm over brutality and abuse.
Rosa DeLauro, the veteran Democrat who serves as ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, did not bother to disguise her anger.
'This is supposedly a hearing about funding for the Department of Homeland Security, and yet, the Secretary of Homeland Security is in hiding,' she told the Homeland Security subcommittee. 'Secretary Noem should be here today. She should be explaining why her department is arresting and deporting American citizens. Why is it pulling law-abiding residents out of their cars, beating them in the streets... She should be answering here for the shameless lies that she has told about two American citizens who were killed in cold blood by her agents. But she is not here. She is hiding because she knows that her conduct is indefensible.'
The language was incendiary, but DeLauro's core point was simple: when the government asks Congress to keep writing cheques for DHS, the least it can do is send the people in charge to explain themselves.
She thanked representatives from FEMA, the US Coast Guard, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the TSA and the Secret Service for turning up. Then she pointedly underlined who had stayed away.
'Why are they not here? That should tell you everything you need to know about what this hearing is really all about,' she said. In her view, the exercise was a piece of political choreography: showcase the popular, uncontroversial bits of DHS while skating past the allegations of 'unchecked brutality' within ICE and CBP.
The charge is devastating: that two American citizens are dead, 'countless others' injured, and yet the architects of that system are absent from the one room where they might be held to account.
Taken together, the fury at Bondi over Epstein and the exasperation with DHS over immigration point to the same fracture. Trust in law enforcement — from the gilded circles of a billionaire sex offender to the dusty roads where migrants are pulled from their cars — is wearing thin. When key officials dodge hearings or hide behind redactions, it is hardly surprising that the word 'cover-up' finds such easy purchase.
Meanwhile, the official White House schedule rolls on. Donald Trump was due to greet Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, celebrate a 'Champion of Coal' and sit down with Mark Burnett, his special envoy to the UK. The machinery of power rarely pauses for outrage; it simply absorbs it and moves on.
For those who testified, and those who did not, the question lingers: if this is what accountability looks like, is it any wonder so many people believe the system protects itself first and the public second?
Originally published on IBTimes UK
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