Former Attorney General Pam Bondi diagnosed with thyroid cancer
Shortly after former Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired in April, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Axios first reported her cancer diagnosis.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi faces potentially politically charged questioning on May 29 when she answers questions from a Congressional Oversight Committee over the Justice Department’s handling of the case of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Bondi is scheduled to meet behind closed doors with the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating the alleged mismanagement of the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Epstein and his convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. President Donald Trump fired Bondi on April 2, reportedly in part over dissatisfaction with the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein file, which has become a political thorn in the president’s side.
The May 29 meeting will not be televised, but the committee has said it will release the transcript as soon as possible, and both Bondi and lawmakers may choose to discuss it publicly.
California Rep. Robert Garcia, the committee’s top Democrat, said Bondi was allowed to sit in on a transcribed interview rather than a sworn affidavit, even though the committee rejected similar requests from former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Mr. Garcia said in his letter that, unlike a deposition, the transcript of the interview allows Mr. Bondi to be represented by a government lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, and to refuse to answer questions unless he provides a legal basis.
Bondi was diagnosed with thyroid cancer within weeks of being fired and was originally scheduled to answer questions in mid-April. But after her resignation, the Justice Department said she was no longer required to comply with a subpoena to leave office. Democrats argued that her failure to appear for the deposition amounted to a violation of the subpoena.
The committee then arranged an interview for May 29th.
Even if conducted in private, the interview is likely to be explosive. Before her expulsion from the Justice Department, multiple impeachment measures introduced by Democratic lawmakers accused her of neglecting Epstein’s victims.
The main questions that Bondi may face in the interview are:
Will it protect Epstein’s circle from liability?
Mr. Bondi is likely to be questioned about whether the Justice Department has avoided accountability for those associated with Epstein.
So far, Epstein and his ex-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, are the only people facing federal criminal charges in connection with Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking scheme. Epstein was convicted of prostitution charges involving minors in Florida in 2008 and died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 ahead of his scheduled trial on sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking of minors in 2021 and is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Bondi’s Justice Department released a memo in July saying Epstein had more than 1,000 victims, but a systematic internal review of Epstein’s files did not uncover an incriminating list of Epstein’s clients. Bondi has since been accused by some of engaging in a cover-up to protect wealthy and politically connected individuals.
“This is bigger than Watergate. This spans four administrations,” Sen. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told Bondi during a Feb. 11 hearing. “This cover-up has been going on for decades, and you are partly responsible for it.”
Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pennsylvania), who serves on the oversight committee, told USA TODAY in March that the Bondi Justice Department’s failure to take new action against Epstein associates, despite Britain’s arrests based on the Justice Department’s public disclosures, shows that America’s elites have protections that working-class Americans do not have.
“The American people are tired of seeing that two-tiered justice system,” Lee said.
“If we have information about men who have abused women, we will prosecute them,” Todd Blanche, who served as Bondi’s deputy, said on January 30.
Failed to free file
In February 2025, Bondi stoked expectations that the Justice Department would release damaging information about Epstein and his associates, telling Fox News, “My office is going to release some information about Epstein.”
But Bondi’s Justice Department issued a memo several months later stating that “further disclosure is inappropriate and cannot be warranted.”
Since then, several Republican and Democratic members of Congress have accused the Justice Department of illegally withholding documents in the face of a Congressional subpoena and subsequent bipartisan Transparency Act. Mr. Bondi has previously defended the Justice Department’s records, saying reviewing and redacting the files was a huge undertaking and missed legal deadlines to release the documents.
“Based on the law that was passed, we had 30 days to redact and release 3 million documents, which when stacked up would be the height of the Eiffel Tower,” Bondi told reporters on March 18.
The Justice Department ultimately released about 3.5 million pages of files by late January, but withheld another 2.5 million pages and heavily redacted much of what it released.
Todd Blanche, who was representing Bondi at the time, said many documents were suppressed to protect the victim’s privacy as allowed by transparency laws. But he also said the Justice Department withheld the documents for some reason not permitted by law, including to hide internal Justice Department deliberations related to Epstein.
White House involvement?
Mr. Bondi is likely to be asked whether the White House, which could include Mr. Trump personally, influenced the Justice Department’s decisions about what to release, who to investigate, and whether to indict additional Epstein associates.
For years, President Trump’s aides have urged federal authorities to release files on Epstein. After Mr. Trump returned to office, administration officials promoted the campaign by suggesting new names and new responsibilities were in place for Mr. Epstein’s alleged client list.
In February 2025, when asked by British journalist Piers Morgan if there was a “possibility of criminal activity” in connection with Epstein, Alina Haba replied, “Yes.” Haba was serving as an advisor to the president at the time. “We don’t have time for things like hiding lists and protecting political friends.”
“Today is a new day, a new administration, and everything will be revealed to the public,” Bondi told Fox News host Sean Hannity in a March 2025 interview.
But in May of that year, Bondi reportedly told Trump that his name appeared multiple times in the file. In July, the Justice Department announced that the case against Epstein was effectively closed after a “systematic review” of the files.
“No evidence was found that could form the basis for an investigation against unindicted third parties,” the Justice Department said in a memo. “Further disclosure is not appropriate or warranted.”
Trump, who was a personal friend of Epstein’s until the 2000s and has always denied wrongdoing, later said Democrats were spreading lies and urged his supporters to move on..
“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein hoax,” the president posted on Truth Social on July 16.
Committee members may point to these events to question whether Bondi’s decisions regarding transparency and investigations were unduly influenced by the White House.
Name and image of alleged victim released
Bondi also faces questions about the department’s failure to first redact all names and images of potential victims when it released the files.
The transparency law that mandated disclosure also gave the Justice Department the power to protect the identities and personal records of victims and protect child sexual abuse material from the public. Mr. Bondi personally reiterated his commitment to protecting victims.
But when a trove of files was released in late January, the names of some Epstein accusers were made public for the first time, and even nude images were made public. Bondi told Congress on February 11 that department officials “did their best within the deadlines allotted by law to protect the victims.”
“If someone provided us with a victim’s name that was inadvertently made public, we redacted it immediately,” Bondi said.
