'Blindsided and annoyed': Pam Bondi insiders tell of fury at Tulsi Gabbard

Attorney General Pam Bondi found herself scrambling to contain the political fallout after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard hijacked her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein crisis and launched an uncoordinated attack on Barack Obama, according to several sources close to the AG.

Gabbard, reportedly desperate to repair her standing with Trump after being "excoriated" and excluded from recent meetings, suddenly demanded Bondi investigate what she called a "treasonous conspiracy" by Obama officials regarding the 2016 Russia investigation.

The move caught Bondi completely off-guard, the sources told The New York Times. Fresh off a nasty fight with top FBI officials over the mess regarding her announcement that an Epstein client list didn’t exist, the attorney general was given "little warning" that Gabbard was about to dump the Obama investigation in her lap, sources said.

Sources inside her camp told the Times she "felt blindsided and annoyed."

Gabbard made the announcement earlier this week, then went into detail during a surprise appearance at a White House press conference on Wednesday.

"She's, like, hotter than everybody. She's the hottest one in the room right now," Trump declared at a White House event Tuesday, signaling Gabbard was back in his good graces after her diversionary attack relieved pressure from the "never-ending Epstein file crisis."

But the stunt put Bondi in an "nearly untenable position." Her staff scrambled for a solution that would satisfy Trump without committing to a politically explosive Obama investigation with "unpredictable legal and political consequences."

Hours after Gabbard's provocative White House briefing, Bondi's deputies posted an ambiguous statement announcing a "strike force" to examine the accusations—though details about the group's operations and timeline remained absent.

A spokesman for Obama dismissed the attacks as "ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction."

Current and former officials warned that building a coherent conspiracy case against Obama-era intelligence officials would be "challenging," while prosecuting Obama himself would be "practically impossible" given Supreme Court immunity protections.

Gabbard stepped far outside traditional intelligence boundaries by directly accusing Obama of criminal wrongdoing, the Times reported.

"The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment," she claimed, though she "produced no evidence of wrongdoing."

Republican senators offered Bondi an escape route by suggesting a special counsel—forcing her into a "tactical U-turn" since she's opposed such appointments in political cases.