After yesterday’s revelation that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is blocking the release of a memo related to a Drug Enforcement Agency investigation into sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and 14 co-conspirators, Attorney General Pam Bondi added more evidence to the idea that the DOJ is engaged in covering up the relationship between members of the Trump administration, including President Donald J. Trump himself, and Epstein.
On March 4, 2026, five Republicans joined the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to agree to subpoena Bondi to testify before it under oath about how the DOJ handled the release of the Epstein files. Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) issued the subpoena on March 17, requiring Bondi to appear before the committee on April 14. Kyle Stewart and Kyla Guilfoil of NBC News reported yesterday that a DOJ spokesperson said the subpoena was “completely unnecessary” and said Bondi “continues to have calls and meetings with members of Congress on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which is why the Department offered to brief the committee.”
Yesterday, March 18, Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared at that “briefing,” a closed-door hearing before the committee in which they were not under oath. Democrats asked repeatedly if Bondi intended to comply with the subpoena; she refused to commit. When Summer Lee (D-PA) asked Comer if he would compel Bondi to comply and hold her in contempt if she doesn’t, Comer told her she was “bitching.”
Ultimately, the Democrats walked out of the briefing. Talking to reporters, Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who has been key to untangling the released Epstein files, said: “[T]o me, it’s very clear that the purpose of this entire fake hearing, this fake deposition, is the attorney general trying to weasel herself out of sitting in front of us under oath, under a bipartisan subpoena…. We asked her multiple times, ‘Are you going to come and speak with us under oath?’ She would not say yes.”
Frost pushed back on Republican colleagues who argued that the briefing should be enough. “We want her under oath because we do not trust her. Why don’t we trust her? Because she’s a liar.” He noted that in the recent hearing before the House Judiciary Committee about the files, Bondi’s documents revealed the DOJ is keeping track of what documents members of Congress are reading. He also noted the DOJ has put up documents related to Trump only when investigators called out that they were missing.
“We want her under oath because we don’t trust her,” Frost reiterated. “We want her under oath because she has shown that she is involved in a cover up…. So we see this for what it is. This is not a briefing; a briefing is when we sit down and we’re getting information from the person giving the briefing. That didn’t happen here. She sat down, they started the clock like a hearing. It’s a hearing. It is a fake deposition, where no one can see what’s going on, with zero transcription, where it’s not on C-Span or anything, and where no one is under oath, and they are allowed to freely lie to members of Congress.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe were under oath when they testified yesterday before the Senate Intelligence Committee on “worldwide threats.” Democratic senators focused on the war with Iran. The administration officials refused to say if they had told Trump that the Iranians could well block the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. struck in the country.
Gabbard tried not to contradict Trump, eliminating from her opening statement that the 2025 strikes against Iran’s nuclear enrichment program had “obliterated” it and that the country had not started the program up again, for example. When asked why she didn’t read that portion of her opening statement, she said she realized her statement was running long.
Asked by Senator Angus King (I-ME) if reports that Russia is sharing intelligence with Iran are true, Gabbard seemed to try to hide that information, saying, “If there is that sharing going on…, that would be an answer that would be appropriate for a closed session.” King pointed out that this report is in the public press, so it’s not a secret. Again he asked her if it is occurring. Again she answered: “If it is occurring, that would be an answer appropriate for a closed session.” She continued: “What I can tell you is that according, um, to the Department of War, uh, any support that Iran may be receiving is not inhibiting their operational effects.”
King responded: “Okay, that’s sort of the first cousin of a yes.”
Asked by Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) if the intelligence community assessed that Iran posed an “imminent threat,” Gabbard said “the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president.” In fact, Ossoff pointed out, it is “precisely” the job of the intelligence community to make such a determination, and he established that the intelligence community did not assess that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. before Trump struck it. Ossoff called Gabbard out for “evading a question because to provide a candid response to the Committee would contradict a statement from the White House.”
In response to questioning by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), FBI Director Patel admitted that under Trump, the government has been buying information on Americans from private companies, buying location data derived from internet advertising. Wyden noted that in 2023, FBI director Christopher Wray testified that the FBI did not buy that information, although it had done so in the past.
Asked if the FBI was still using that policy and if he would commit to keep the FBI from buying that data, Patel answered: “We do purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us.”
As Robert Mackey of The Guardian explains, if law enforcement officers want to get location data directly from cell phone companies, they have to go to a judge for a warrant. But government agencies are trying to get around the Fourth Amendment requirement for those judicial warrants by buying that information directly from private data brokers.
Wyden has always strongly opposed surveillance of Americans. He posted: “Kash Patel refused to deny that the FBI is buying up Americans’ location data. This is a shocking end run around the 4th amendment and exactly why we need to pass real privacy reforms NOW.”
Concerns about data privacy have been heightened since March 10, when Meryl Kornfield, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Lisa Rein reported in the Washington Post on a whistleblower complaint filed in January saying that a former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency claimed he had taken two highly restricted databases of information about U.S. citizens from the Social Security Administration, where he had unrestricted access, and that he planned to take them to a government contractor. Those files included the Social Security numbers, birth dates, place of birth, citizenship, race, ethnicity, and parents’ names of more than 500 million living and dead Americans.
According to the whistleblower, the person with the files said he needed help transferring the data from a thumb drive to a personal computer in order to “sanitize” the data before using it at his new job. When another colleague refused to help, citing concern about breaking the law, the person with the information allegedly said he expected that Trump would give him a pardon if he needed it.
In January, Kornfield reported in the Washington Post that after another whistleblower complaint, the administration admitted to a court that the Social Security Administration had discovered that a DOGE employee had entered into a secret agreement with a political group, promising to share Social Security data in order to overturn election results in certain states. Kornfield reported that the SSA also acknowledged that DOGE employees had used an unofficial third-party service to share data with each other and that the SSA had been unable to access it.
University of Virginia privacy law expert Danielle Citron told Kornfield she was “flabbergasted.” “If that information is shared willingly and knowingly and they are sharing without the reason they collected it, it’s a violation of the Privacy Act.”
At the time, the top Democrat on the House Social Security subcommittee, John B. Larson of Connecticut, and the Ways and Means Committee’s ranking Democrat, Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, said that the DOGE “appointees engaged in this scheme—who were never brought before Congress for approval or even publicly identified—must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for these abhorrent violations of the public trust.”
A DOJ official told Kornfield then that the department was not currently investigating DOGE. The Social Security Administration inspector general is investigating the new whistleblower complaint.
Yesterday Noah Robertson, Jeff Stein, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has asked the White House to approve a request for more than $200 billion to fund the Iran war. Hegseth confirmed the request today, explaining: “It takes money to kill bad guys.”
