Attorney General Pam Bondi has defended last week’s fake Jeffrey Epstein document release while also claiming she was misled about the completeness of files in her possession.
She repeatedly has promised that Americans will eventually see the entire collection of evidence related to the disgraced billionaire pedophile, but hasn’t given a timeline.
“I kept saying, there has to be more. There has to be more,” Bondi told Fox News on Saturday. “I was assured that’s it.”
The controversy erupted after Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel distributed white binders labeled “Epstein Files: Phase 1” to MAGA-aligned social media influencers at a White House event last Thursday.
White House officials were reportedly blindsided by Bondi’s plan to distribute the binders, which were not included in the original meeting agenda.
The documents, which only contained previously released information and flight logs, were widely panned across the political spectrum as a “nothingburger” that failed to deliver on Bondi’s earlier promises of revealing “a lot of names” related to Epstein, who died under mysterious circumstances in 2019 while in custody awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“It was not a good day for the administration. If you look at the traffic online over the Epstein release, I have never seen the left and the right come together in a moment on the debacle of what the Epstein files contained,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-F.L., said.
Even staunch Trump allies expressed frustration with the release. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-F.L., who chairs a bipartisan House panel reviewing classified documents in high-profile cases, wrote on social platform X: “THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment. GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR!”
Bondi later claimed she learned from a “whistleblower” after the release that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was “sitting on thousands of pages of documents” that had not been provided to her. In response, she said she gave the FBI a deadline of 8 a.m. Friday to deliver all remaining Epstein-related materials.
“I gave [the FBI] a deadline of Friday at 8 a.m. to get us everything,” Bondi told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “And a source had told me where the documents were being kept, Southern District of New York, shock. So we got them all by Friday at 8 a.m.”
There has been no new news since.
The fallout has reportedly created tension within the Trump administration. Sources told ABC News that Bondi instructed her team not to inform White House officials of her plan to distribute the binders, apparently believing the surprise would be well received.
The binders were marked “Declassified” across the top, though they did not contain any official government declassification markings. Images of influencers leaving the White House with the binders quickly went viral, creating high expectations that fell completely flat.