US Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche depart following a closed-door briefing for members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on the Justice Department's handling of the Epstein investigation and compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, 18 March 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

The ending of Pam Bondi’s tenure as US Attorney General over her handling of the Epstein files is further evidence of a fundamental shift in the way power is wielded in Washington.

Long before Donald Trump ever became US president, he and Jeffrey Epstein – the now deceased financier and sex offender – were close associates. ‘I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,’ Trump told a magazine in a feature profile of Epstein in 2002. ‘He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,’ Trump is quoted as saying.

President Trump and Epstein were both New Yorkers who had grown up in the city’s outer boroughs. In 2025 the US House Oversight Committee released a note allegedly written by Trump to Epstein for the latter’s 50th birthday in 2003. It contains a bawdy message inside a hand-drawn outline of a woman’s body. ‘A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,’ the note said. President Trump has denied any involvement in the note.

Five years later, Epstein would plead guilty in a Florida state court to solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of sex from a minor. The guilty plea to state charges was part of what was later criticised as an overly lenient non-prosecution deal. In exchange for lenient treatment, Epstein agreed to pay compensation to victims.

Epstein was reinvestigated by the US Attorney’s Office in New York and charged in 2019 with sex trafficking. He died in prison a month after being denied bail. His death was officially ruled a suicide.

President Trump promised during his 2024 campaign that if re-elected he would release the so-called ‘Epstein files’, a collection of documents, images and emails detailing the activities of Epstein and his associates. Then-Attorney-General Pam Bondi proclaimed in February 2025, just days after being confirmed by the Senate, that Epstein’s client list was ‘sitting on [her] desk right now to review.’

The rise and fall of the ‘AMERICA FIRST Fighter’

‘For too long, the partisan Department of Justice [DoJ] has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore,’ Trump said in a social media post when he nominated Bondi in late 2024. Bondi was ‘smart and tough’, Trump said. She would ‘refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and making America Safe Again’. Bondi would be ‘an AMERICA FIRST Fighter’, President Trump added.

Bondi had already proven herself as an aggressive and loyal political defender of President Trump. As state attorney general in Florida, Bondi’s political committee had accepted a $25,000 campaign contribution from Trump in 2013. Her office later declined to investigate fraud claims involving Trump University, which were eventually settled without admission of any wrongdoing.

Bondi helped President Trump in 2016 with his first transition to the White House. Notably, she defended Trump in his first impeachment trial in the US Senate in 2020, arguing that the President was a victim of partisan persecution.

As Attorney-General, Bondi quickly dismissed top DoJ lawyers who had overseen the prosecutions of the pro-Trump rioters who overran the US Capitol in January 2021, according to those involved. She invoked the President’s Article II constitutional authority in letters to those being dismissed.

Senior career officials who had worked on then-Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Trump were pushed out of the DoJ, meanwhile, reportedly because they couldn’t be trusted to ‘assist in faithfully implementing the president’s agenda.’ Smith had charged Trump with crimes for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election and for illegally retaining secret national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago property after leaving office. Trump denied the charges and they were later dismissed.

Bondi’s DoJ withdrew numerous pending US enforcement cases involving fraud, corruption and consumer abuse that had been brought under the previous Biden administration, usually without explanation. Within days of President Trump taking office, a DoJ memo ordered a freeze on cases brought by the department’s civil rights division, including any new complaints.

Instead, Bondi reportedly redirected DoJ resources to support President Trump’s nationwide mass deportation campaign to remove millions of migrants from the US. The DoJ’s conduct in many of those cases has prompted career prosecutors to resign. It has also left some US judges questioning the honesty and reliability of statements made by prosecutors in court.

Bondi pursued a number of prosecutions on President Trump’s behalf that critics characterised as politically charged. The DoJ pursued criminal charges against New York State Attorney-General Letitia James, who had successfully sued Trump for business fraud. It brought charges against former FBI Director James Comey who President Trump had blamed for the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Those cases fell apart in court.

Where Bondi ran into serious trouble was in mishandling the Epstein files, exposing Trump.

Bondi stoked expectations that the public would finally get the truth about Epstein after President Trump took office. In early 2025, conservative commentators and influencers were brought to the White House where they were provided with binders of supposedly ‘declassified’ Epstein files. It was a disappointment – most of the material was already public.

Facing a backlash, Bondi promised that a ‘truckload’ of new information would be forthcoming from the FBI’s vaults. ‘We’re going to go through it, go through it as fast as we can, but go through it very cautiously to protect all the victims of Epstein,’ Bondi said in March 2025. ‘And it’s a new day. It’s a new administration, and everything’s going to come out to the public. The public has the right to know. Americans have a right to know,’ she added.

By May 2025, however, Bondi’s review of the files had reportedly revealed that Trump’s name and many others appeared multiple times in the government’s records. Being named is not necessarily an indication of wrongdoing. Bondi informed President Trump in a White House meeting that the DoJ didn’t plan to release any further Epstein documents.

The decision was announced in July that year. In a statement, the government said the files contained images and videos of Epstein’s victims who appear to be minors. Further, a review had found no client list or evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent men. ‘We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged parties,’ the statement said.

Then-Deputy Attorney-General Todd Blanche arranged a two-day interview with Epstein’s former girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite, who had been convicted in 2021 on sex trafficking charges and was serving a 20-year sentence at a federal prison in Florida. In the widely criticised interview, Maxwell said she ‘never saw’ Trump in ‘any inappropriate setting’.

The White House hoped that would be the end of the public furore over the Epstein files. Maxwell was given a transfer to a low-security women’s prison in Texas colloquially known as ‘Club Fed’. President Trump declared that ‘nothing came out about me’ and it was time to ‘move on’. The Epstein files were a ‘hoax’, he said.

Millions of pages

Political pressure continued to build and in November 2025, Congress passed legislation by a veto-proof margin requiring the DoJ to release the Epstein files. The government has produced over three million pages of documents from its files – about half of the total the DoJ holds, according to one of the lawmakers who led on efforts to secure their release.

Trump was named more than 1,000 times. He flew on Epstein’s private aeroplane, nicknamed the ‘Lolita Express’, at least eight times in the 1990s. The files contained unsubstantiated sexual assault allegations involving Trump. The DoJ issued a statement saying the claims were ‘untrue and sensationalist.’

In February, Bondi appeared at a contentious House Judiciary Committee hearing. Representative Jamie Raskin accused her of ‘grotesque mishandling’ of the Epstein files. Bondi called him a ‘washed-up loser lawyer’ and yelled, ‘You don’t tell me anything!’ She refused to apologise to victims of Epstein who were in the audience.

After months of reportedly expressing private frustrations with Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files and her inability to successfully prosecute his political enemies, President Trump dismissed her via a social media post on 2 April. He named Blanche, who had defended Trump against felony charges in New York in between his first and second presidential terms, to temporarily replace Bondi.

Contrary to the law, the DoJ didn’t adequately protect the identities of victims when it released the Epstein documents. Dozens of women’s names were not redacted, exposing them publicly. Documents and media ‘that may have inadvertently included victim-identifying information due to various factors, including technical or human error,’ had been taken down, the DoJ said. ‘One of the horrors is how so many survivors continue to be traumatised’ by the DoJ’s mishandling of the Epstein files, said Representative Robert Garcia.

President Trump famously said during the height of the Russia investigation in his first term, ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ His Attorney-General at the time, Jeff Sessions, had just recused himself from handling the DoJ’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

By traditional Washington standards, Sessions did the right thing. He had been in contact with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington during the campaign. It would have been an obvious and disqualifying conflict of interest to then play a role in the investigation.

In the 1950s, Cohn had been Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the notorious ‘Red Scare’ hearings in Congress when hundreds of people accused of communist sympathies lost their jobs in government, labour unions, colleges and Hollywood. Cohn went on to become a famed political fixer in New York City where he represented Trump in the early 1970s against charges of racial discrimination in Trump’s apartment buildings. Those charges were later resolved in a consent decree that required Trump to take steps on anti-discrimination. He did not admit liability.

Cohn, if he were still alive, wouldn’t have hesitated to go on the attack for President Trump. Unscrupulous and ruthless, Cohn’s modus operandi was to never concede or apologise, to treat compromise as weakness and counterattack relentlessly.

Acting Attorney-General Blanche is now doing exactly that. He has created a $1.776bn ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ designed to compensate people like the 6 January 2021 riot defendants who claim they were politically targeted. He has aggressively revived investigations into people, including journalists, with whom President Trump has grievances. And he has defended the President from criticism that the DoJ is being politicised. He’s been quiet about the Epstein files.

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com