¶ Intro / Opening
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¶ Introducing Pam Bondi and DOJ Trust
Hey, everyone. Ellie here wishing you a happy Friday. First of all, just want to remind all of you loyal Cafe listeners and subscribers that my next book is now available for presale on Amazon. It's called When You Come at the King, Inside DOJ's Pursuit of the... president, from Nixon to Trump. Each of the major cases you can think of, from Watergate to Iran-Contra.
to Clinton and Ken Starr, on through the modern Mueller and Durham and Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and Robert Herr and Jack Smith and Donald Trump, inside accounts of all of those cases, defense lawyers, prosecutors, defendants, witnesses. White House officials, FBI agents, you name it. I bring you inside those cases. It was a ball. It was a true blast to put this book together. You won't believe some of the people who spoke to me on the record. Okay, enough of this week's plug.
Now, for this week's piece, I want to visit with our current Attorney General, Pam Bondi. It's been a bit since we've checked in on her. It's not going great. I'll tease the piece a little bit. I think she's had a very unusual and maybe dangerous— inflection point for her. Anyway, on with this week's piece. As always, love to hear your thoughts, questions, comments. Send them into letters at cafe.com.
On my first day as a federal prosecutor with the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, I received... The Reservoir Speech, and I do capitalize the R and S in Reservoir Speech. Justice Department alums are nodding right now in recognition. We all got some variation of the talk. In broad strokes, think of DOJ as a reservoir and the water.
in it as public trust. It takes years to build up that water supply, but even a slight crack can drain it quickly. Now that you're part of the Justice Department, you'll have the benefit of the doubt, and judges and the general public will believe what you say.
¶ Bondi's Early False Claims and Distrust
because of that hard earned public trust. Don't be the one to crack the reservoir and drain it. After just five months, yeah, it's only been five months leading the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi is threatening to leave the reservoir.
tapped out. She has confirmed the worst fears of Democrats who opposed her from the start, and now she's pulled off the more difficult task of alienating conservatives and the pro-Trump MAGA base, those two categories not necessarily being one and the same. Liberals distrusted Bondi all along.
She wasn't quite as outrageous a selection for AG as Matt Gaetz, who never made it to the confirmation stage. At least Bondi had been a prosecutor for over 20 years, including two terms as the attorney general of Florida. Unlike Gaetz, she was qualified. on paper. But Bondi's natural political antagonist doubted her credibility. After the 2020 election, Bondi falsely proclaimed that, quote, we won Pennsylvania. We are thrilled to have won Pennsylvania, end quote. Despite Trump's loss.
of that Commonwealth by over 80,000 votes. Bondi publicly cited, quote, evidence of cheating and fake ballots. No such evidence ever materialized. And take note. because we'll get back to it later, of this tendency by Bondi to cite evidence that does not exist. And Bondi went beyond rhetoric. She strategized with other Trump advisors to use those false claims to challenge the 2020 election results in the courts. When Bondi was questioned,
At her February 2025 confirmation hearing about her election lies, she retreated to the bullshit signifier fashioned by other Trump loyal power seekers. Quote, President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in. Give me a break. During her short stint as AG, Bondi has continued to prevaricate casually at times and tactically at others. In April 2025, for example.
she boldly proclaimed that Trump had single-handedly saved 258 million lives by seizing dangerous fentanyl. The day before, she had posited that Trump had saved a piddling 119 million lives. Apparently, if not for the president, about three-fourths of the American public would be dead right now. More consequentially than rhetorical exaggeration, Bondi showed herself to be both a hopeless partisan, that part was already widely suspected, and an inveterate truth stretcher.
when she refused even to open an investigation of the misuse of the signal messaging app by top intelligence officials. To explain her inaction, Bondi preposterously concluded, despite having done zero actual investigation, That specific information about impending military attack plans was somehow, quote, not classified and inadvertently released. None of that made a dent with Trump loyalists, however. It took the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
¶ The Jeffrey Epstein Document Fiasco
with all its attendant conspiracy mongering to turn them against the attorney general. Now, Bondi, you might recall, marched into the AG suite promising jaw-dropping revelations about the infamous child molesters' expanded network. In February 2025 on Fox News, she teased an impending initial release of Epstein-related materials as, quote, breaking news, credulous conservative influencer posed on the White House lawn, self-importantly holding aloft binders marked the Epstein files, phase one.
Turned out those binders contained about 200 pages of documents, most of which had already been previously released, and none of which established anything new or interesting. Some Republican officials and many in the right-wing media universe flipped out at Bonnie's failure. to deliver as promised. Republican U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna vented on X, quote, this is not what we are the American people asked for, all caps, and a complete disappointment.
Frantically backtracking, Bondi promised more still. She vowed that a second... even juicier document dump was imminent, and that she had somehow been duped by miscreant FBI agents who withheld thousands of documents from her. When asked on Fox News about the purportedly incriminating undisclosed Epstein client list, Bondi promised, quote, it's sitting on my desk right now to review. But this week, Bondi's own Justice Department acknowledged.
that it was all flim-flam. DOJ investigators concluded in an internal memo that after an exhaustive review of over 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence, There was nothing to the wildest of the conspiracy theories. No incriminating client list. No blackmail, no jailhouse murder, no basis to investigate or to charge anybody else. The report offered a sharp rebuke to Epstein conspiracy theorists. One of our highest priorities is combating child exploitation and bringing justice.
to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends. That's a quote from the report. And the memo announced a blunt endpoint. Quote, no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted. If Bondi knew what she was doing, by the way, she never would have wandered aimlessly down the path of disclosing information from closed criminal investigations.
in the first place. When asked about Bondi's apparently false statement that she had the non-existent client list on her desk, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt offered up cringy word salad. Yes, she was saying the entirety of all the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. That's what the attorney general was referring to, end quote.
Well, that explains that. This week, Bondi tried at a cabinet meeting to spin her own prior fib about having the quote client list on her desk while Trump visibly agitated, snapped at the media. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talking.
talked about for years. You're asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable, end quote. Let me just say, in this moment, Trump was absolutely spot on.
¶ Fallout and Bondi's Precarious Position
in his exasperation. Magaculture isn't taking it well. One right-wing influencer posted, quote, at this point, she, meaning Bondi, just has to be fired. Another lamented that Bondi's response to the Epstein situation, quote, makes Trump and his entire administration look so bad, I don't even have words for it. Heavyweight firebrand Tucker Carlson accused Bondi of...
covering up crimes. Megyn Kelly excoriated the AG for being, quote, either lazy and incompetent or she willingly humiliated some of the president's most loyal supporters. Kelly predicted that Bondi's, quote, Days are numbered. Interesting. Bondi likely isn't going anywhere anytime soon. She's too loyal to Trump to find herself in imminent danger, but she'd be well advised to remember two things about Donald Trump. First,
He's sensitive to criticism from certain media outlets, especially right-wing influencers. And second, Trump will cashier an AG who he does not trust to serve his best political purposes. Recall his humiliating public dismissal of Jeff Sessions. Twitter moments after the 2018 midterms and recall his sudden parting of ways with Bill Barr in December 2020, just days after Barr called out Trump's election fraud nonsense. Bondi was never going to win over liberals or Trump haters, but she's
somehow managed to sling so many false promises that she's earned the ire of many of Trump's most loyal supporters. Now she's left that reservoir of credibility, DOJ's and her own, bone dry. Thanks for listening, everyone. Stay safe and stay informed.