6 Big Questions for Pam Bondi on Epstein and ICE

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Hey everyone, Ellie here, wishing you a happy Friday. Well, you know it was just a normal crazy week and not a super crazy week when I am coming to you as scheduled on Friday and not. With some emergency podcast on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. So you have that. That said, plenty happened this week. I do want to address the arrest of Don Lemon. I get into it briefly in the podcast that's coming up, but I want to talk a little bit.

more depth right now. So disclaimer, many of you probably know. I know Don Lemon. I was colleagues with him at CNN for a long time, uh up until he was fired. I think it was twenty twenty three. Don was great to me. Uh, Don was one of the first anchors to discover me, to use me on his show. He was the first anchor to bring me on in primetime. I did his show all the time. We got to be close.

I have a lot of respect and affection for Don. I haven't seen him as much since he's left, but I still see him or communicate with him a couple times a year here and there. I saw him in well, it was December because it was a Christmas party. We had a nice talk. I know Don. I know his husband Tim. Uh so account for that however however you'd like.

The arrest of Don Lemon is outrageous for reasons I probably barely even need to explain to you. I think his journalistic practice running into that church with those protesters was shaky. Uh, I think some of the things Don does in his new iteration as a journalist are journalistically not by the textbook. Uh he he tends to involve himself more than journalists typically should, but that's his approach and it's working for him.

And it's not a question of is he doing journalism right? The question here, the legal dividing line, is he functioning as journalist on the one hand, in which case he's going to be covered by the First Amendment or as a participant, in which case he would not be. I've looked at this indictment line by line. I read some of them when I was hosting on the radio the other day. To me, there is not a point where Don crosses that line. And if he does It's a very much mixed bag.

By and large, he's functioning as a journalist. Do you love him going into the church with those folks who were protesting? I don't. Do you love the tenor of some of the interviews he was doing with some of the people in the church? I don't either. But that doesn't make him not a journalist. What he's doing there is journalism, like it or not.

I think the case is an outrage. I think there's no chance Don gets convicted. I don't even think it'll make it to trial. And he's made the best of it. Look, he's uh his profile is raised, he's gained a ton of followers. And I think it's good that there's so much attention on this and there's almost un well I was gonna say almost universal outrage, but I did Stephen A. Smith's show the day this happened, which is on YouTube, and you have the, I don't know if it's benefit or curse.

of immediately when something's on YouTube, you can look at the comments and see hundreds or thousands of comments. And I thought the comments on Stephen A's show would be ninety-five percent this is an outrage and We're with you Don Lemon. Not really. It was Closer to fifty fifty. I was surprised. It was a lot of people

going after Don and saying he deserved to be arrested, which I think is legally wrong. Uh, and I don't feel that way personally either. So maybe it's I don't know, maybe it's a closer issue than I realize, but I'm quite confident how it will play out in the courts. We'll see if I'm right. We'll see if I'm wrong. Okay, folks. Uh, on with this week's podcast. As always, I do love to hear your thoughts, questions, comments. Send them into letters atcafe.com.

At last week's White House cabinet meeting, Donald Trump called on an expected array of his most influential agency chiefs. Treasury, health and human services, housing. The president even dug down a layer and gave Mike time to second-tier bosses from agriculture. Quote, that sounds amazing, opined Secretary Brooke Rollins of Steel Tariff. Small business, quote, you've ended at least eight wars, okay? Gushed administrator Kelly Loffler. What that has to do with small business, I have no idea.

And commerce. Two days after the cabinet meeting, newly disclosed emails revealed that Secretary Howard Lutnick, who previously claimed he cut ties with Jeffrey Epstein in 2005, actually sought to visit Epstein's Island in 2012. Yet, through it all, Trump paid no mind to the person who sat directly across the table from him, the Attorney General of the United States. Even with weighty justice-relevant issues exploding across the country, Bondi sat silently through the entire 80-minute meeting.

The next day, DOJ called a press conference to address the Epstein files and Minnesota and other pressing matters. Out to the podium walked not Bondi, but Deputy Attorney General Todd Bland. Two days later, Blanche hit the Sunday morning talk show scene while the AG was again nowhere to be seen.

But Bondi can't hide and be hidden forever. Next week, the Attorney General will testify on Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. So here are six questions that she should be asked and that she needs to answer. First, is the Justice Department investigating anyone in relation to the Epstein sex trafficking ring or not?

It seemed until just recently that we had a clear yes on this one. In mid-November, Trump posted a demand on social media addressed directly to Bondi to investigate, quote, Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reed Hoffman, JP Morgan Chase, and many other people and institutions, end quote. For their connections to Epstein.

Less than four hours later, the Attorney General publicly responded that she had opened the requested inquiry and assigned it to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. Quote, as with all matters, the department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people, Bondi reassured the public. Urgency and integrity and deliver answers. Sounded great.

But last weekend, when CNN's Danabash asked whether DOJ was investigating anybody for crimes related to Epstein, Todd Blanche replied, and I quote, I can't talk about any investigations, but I will say the following, which is that in July, the Department of Justice said that we had reviewed the files, the Epstein files, and there was nothing in there that allowed us to prosecute anybody. the entire world can look at and see if we got it wrong. End quote. In other words, no.

When asked again on Fox News this week whether DOJ is investigating anyone for potential crimes relating to Epstein, Blanche was noncommittal. He said, quote, Well, look, I'll never say no. But then he explained that, and I quote To be clear, I'm quoting here: the American people need to understand that it isn't a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. End quote.

Okay, American people, you heard the man. They were just partying with a notorious international child sex trafficker. Chill out and stop demanding justice already. So which is it? Is the Justice Department investigating or not? Did it open Trump's requested investigations in mid November as Bondi announced? and then close them without charges by the end of January? Or do Bondy and Blanche have their signals crossed and relatedly, who's running the show here anyway, the AG or her deputy?

Second, has DOJ released files relating to its behind-the-scenes strategy around the prosecution and investigation of Epstein and others? The answer here is no, and that's a problem. In its cover memo, accompanying the recent release of the Epstein files, DOJ noted that it has, quote, withheld, end quote, a certain unstated number of documents under the deliberative process privilege.

Blanche said the same in his public announcement about release of the Epstein files. Now, Justice Department leadership didn't invent this privilege. It does exist, and ordinarily it shields prosecutors from publicly disclosing internal strategic communication. The problem is that the Epstein Files Transparency Act anticipates this privilege and specifically precludes its application. That law requires DOJ to release, and I quote,

Internal DOJ communications, including emails, memos, meeting notes concerning decisions to charge, not charge, investigate, or decline to investigate Epstein or his associates. End quote. It seems then that Bondy and her advisors have simply chosen to ignore a key provision of the act and to withhold documents that might explain how Epstein and his enablers have largely avoided meaningful accountability.

Third, is the Justice Department conducting a criminal investigation of the ICE officers who fatally shot Alex Predi in Minnesota? Once again, Bondi will have to answer for Blanche's practiced ambiguity. At his press conference last week, Blanche appeared to confirm that DOJ is criminally investigating ICE officers for deprivation of Predi's civil rights. This is the law commonly used by the feds to charge police officers who use excessive force.

Blanche said, and again I quote, investigations like this are led by law enforcement, so that's the FBI. There's coordination with the Civil Rights Division of DOJ. I expect the Civil Rights Division here at Maine Justice will be part of that effort. End quote. This is indeed what a criminal investigation would look like. But in the next breath, the deputy A.G. backtracked, quote, I don't want the takeaway to be that there's some massive civil rights investigation that's happening, end quote.

So what exactly did Blanche mean? DOJ is investigating. Sorta, but no big deal. Bondi should be pressed to clarify. And while she's at it, the AG also might explain why the Justice Department immediately foreclosed the possibility of a civil rights probe of the fatal shooting of Renee Good even before doing any actual investigation. Next up. Why have the federal authorities shut out local Minnesota law enforcement officials from the investigations of the deaths of Predi and maybe of Good?

While the Justice Department naturally can and should run point on any fatal shooting by a federal law enforcement agent, it makes no tactical sense for the feds to freeze out state and local investigators. Why exclude the police officers who know the terrain, who have access to local resources, who've earned some degree of trust from the community? Instead, DOJ leadership immediately excluded Minnesota investigators.

creating a suboptimal scenario of two separate, potentially competing investigations. Now Trump attributed the decision to shut out the locals in no particular logical order to Governor Tim Walls being a quote stupid person, to a purported quote, nineteen billion dollars stolen from a lot of people, but mostly by people from Somalia.

And quote, a corrupt voting system in a state he won, and again I quote, all three times, and quote, he actually lost all three times. Let Bondi try to explain this one. Next up, after the arrest of Don Lemon, the official White House social media account posted, quote, when life gives you lemons, dot dot dot, followed by two emojis showing chains, and a photo of Lemon over the words Don Lemon arrested.

Do you, Madam Attorney General, approve of this celebratory post? And if the case ultimately fails, will you take it back and apologize? Okay, this is admittedly more of an accusation than a genuine question, but the White House post is as reprehensible as it is revealing. Of course, the White House is dictating DOJ's priorities. Of course.

Both entities are celebrating prematurely, popping champagne when the game has just begun. Of course, this post will backfire when Lemon eventually gets the case dismissed. Based on the First Amendment and now vindictive prosecution. Bondi surely will profess ignorance of the post, but she's done nothing to push back against this type of juvenile, self-defeating nonsense from her White House overlord.

And finally, does the Justice Department have a credibility problem? Is that your fault? And how will you fix it? If Bondi refuses to acknowledge that DOJ has destroyed its own credibility in the courts, Then she's either ignorant or lying. The evidence is overwhelming and it's undeniable.

NYU law professor Ryan Goodman and his team at Just Security have assembled a damning compendium of over 50 cases in which judges have found that Bondi's prosecutors have failed to comply with court orders or have made false or dubious in-court representations. Federal judges across the country, appointed by presidents of both parties, have found DOJ's in-court representations, quote, untethered to the fact.

highly misleading, if not intentionally false, inexplicably misleading, patently incredible, and simply not credible. Those are all from separate cases. Just to name a handful. At a certain point, and fifty cases seems well beyond it, the problem is with DOJ itself, not the dozens of judges who have called out the department's serial dissembly.

Bondi has had a historically awful first year as Attorney General. Her leadership has been scattershot, and she has presided over and facilitated the destruction of DOJ's independence. Increasingly over the past few months, the administration's strategy has been simply to shield Bondi from public scrutiny. But when she testifies next week, the AG will finally be forced to account for the decimation. Ов the Justice Department she purports to lead.

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