With Attorney General Pam Bondi getting the pink slip on Thursday, MS NOW's Ali Velshi opened the night's edition of "The Briefing" with a sendoff to one of Trump's longtime foot soldiers — and pinned down one of the key moments she humiliated the administration.
"There were a lot of reasons to fire Pam Bondi," said Velshi. "There were plenty of moments from her career, a tenure as attorney general that you could choose from. But there was one moment that I couldn't stop thinking about today. Happened back in February, when Bondi was asked in Congress why she had not prosecuted any of Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirators, and she said this."
He played the clip.
"This administration released over 3 million pages of documents, over 3 million," said Bondi in the hearing. "And Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents. He is the most transparent president in the nation's history. And none of them, none of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years, one word about Jeffrey Epstein. How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump, the Dow, the Dow right now is over, the Dow is over 50,000 — I don't know why you're laughing."
"Yeah," said Velshi. "That Dow was in her burn book. She needed to get that comment out. The Dow is over 50,000. That's why she couldn't prosecute any of the co-conspirators in Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking crimes. Because the Dow was just too high. Ironically, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped below 50,000 points the following day and never broke that threshold again. It's currently down about 3,600 points from that high point, thanks to Trump's war of choice in Iran, but I digress."
"Pam Bondi's attempt to dodge questions about Epstein by screaming about the stock market immediately turned her into a laughingstock," said Velshi. "Thatmoment spawned a thousand memesacross the internet, allmocking the absurdity ofBondi's failed attempt tochange the subject. It even gotits own viral remix."
He played a segment of the clip, in which Bondi's statement was spliced up and autotuned into an electronic song about the Dow. "Pretty catchy, right?" said Velshi.
That moment's "absurdity," he added, "became a perfect encapsulation of the impossible situation that Pam Bondi found herself in. Trump hated the Epstein files were getting so much attention. He called the whole thing a hoax. He wanted it just to go away. So Bondi was trying to downplay the issue out of loyalty to Donald Trump. The problem was that she had already lost all credibility on the issue because at the start of Donald Trump's second term, Bondi teased the MAGA base by telling them that she had obtained a list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients."