Democratic lawmakers walked out of a closed-door congressional briefing on the Jeffrey Epstein files Wednesday night, departing less than an hour in and accusing Attorney General Pam Bondi of stonewalling — the latest rupture in a year-long standoff between Congress and the Justice Department over one of the most politically charged investigations in recent memory. They left vowing to enforce a subpoena compelling Bondi to testify under oath.
Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche made the trip to Capitol Hill in an attempt to ease bipartisan tension over the House Oversight Committee’s probe into how the DOJ managed millions of documents from Epstein’s sex trafficking case.
The committee issued a subpoena Tuesday — after a bipartisan vote that included five Republicans — ordering Bondi to appear for a sworn deposition on April 14.
Democrats say Bondi refused to commit to honoring the subpoena when pressed repeatedly inside the room. “We want her under oath because we do not trust her,” said Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost after leaving.
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Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, called the proceedings “a complete disrespect of the process” and said the American people should be “outraged.” Garcia made clear the walkout does not replace the subpoena.
Bondi pushed back publicly after leaving the building, saying she and Blanche were prepared to answer any question lawmakers had.
“We gave them as much time as they wanted, and one congresswoman screamed C-SPAN wasn’t in there, so she didn’t want to ask questions,” she said. Bondi said the DOJ combed through 3 million Epstein files — equivalent in height to the Eiffel Tower — and her team worked to protect victims throughout the process. “We’re proud of the work that we’ve done,” she said.
Critics from both parties accuse the DOJ of withholding documents that should have been disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act — a law Congress enacted after the Justice Department missed a December 19, 2025, deadline to release all government files on Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Read: DOJ Caught Hiding Trump Accusations in Epstein Files
The DOJ deployed hundreds of attorneys to review the records before publishing them, ultimately releasing a tranche in January that included more than 3 million pages, over 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images — but lawmakers say the redactions were so sloppily applied they sometimes exposed victim information rather than shielding it.
Deputy AG Blanche said separately the department has no new evidence to prosecute anyone for crimes connected to Epstein, and dismissed a range of conspiracy theories surrounding the case — including claims Epstein was killed by a foreign intelligence service, that the body removed from his cell was a double, and that the files contain coded references tied to the Pizzagate theory.
On that last point, Blanche was direct: “I do not” believe there is any validity to it.
The committee has moved aggressively on all fronts in recent months. Lawmakers deposed former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Chappaqua, New York, last month, and separately heard from Richard Kahn, Epstein’s former longtime accountant.
In a related development, the former Prince Andrew — now just Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor — was arrested last month in the United Kingdom on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He has previously denied any knowledge of or involvement in Epstein’s crimes.
The DOJ dismissed the subpoena as “completely unnecessary,” arguing that lawmakers already have direct access to unredacted files at the department’s own building.
Bondi has accused Democrats of using the Epstein furor to distract from the administration’s political agenda — a charge Democrats reject, noting that members of Trump’s own party leveled some of the sharpest criticism of the DOJ’s document handling.
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