Attorney General Pam Bondi has faced extraordinary blowback over her performance at last week’s congressional hearing, including criticism from prominent conservative figures such as Fox News’ Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, who recently joined the dogpile.
“She comes off like a shrieking Karen!” Kennedy said on Friday during an appearance on Fox News' "The Five," speaking of Bondi’s frequent heated exchanges with lawmakers.
Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee last Wednesday and faced a barrage of questions about Jeffrey Epstein. The questions largely centered around her own agency’s failure to release Epstein-related files in accordance with the law, and around her agency’s failure to prosecute a single potential co-conspirator of Epstein.
Bondi frequently shouted at lawmakers during the hearing, and on more than one occasion, awkwardly pivoted from a question about Epstein to the strong performance of the stock market, a pivot that’s gone on to receive bipartisan condemnation.
Kennedy appears to be among those on the right criticizing Bondi’s performance.
“When she's this emotional, it looks like she's lost a little bit of the edge, and she seems very, very unpersuasive,” Kennedy said. “It seems like the job is consuming her. She needs to turn it down a little bit.”
Bondi’s performance was viewed as so poor that one political expert – Mohamad Aly Elleithee, executive director of the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown University – suspected that she may very well be on “shaky ground” with President Donald Trump, who he noted is acutely aware of potential political liabilities.