U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi attends a House Appropriations Justice Subcommittee hearing on U.S. President Donald Trump's budget request for the Department of Justice, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 23, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Attorney General Pam Bondi is in trouble, political analysts assessed during a discussion Wednesday.
Speaking to MSNBC's Katy Tur about President Donald Trump's Jeffrey Epstein problem, the commentators couldn't help but notice that the MAGA world is starting to blame Bondi for the unfulfilled promises about the probe.
Conservative Liz Wheeler, ex-Fox host Megyn Kelly, and several others are pointing to Bondi after several Trump appointees over-promised and under-delivered on the Epstein files.
FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, pledged that every ounce of information available on Epstein would be made public. Bondi even went so far as to respond to questions about a "client list" by saying it was "on my desk." She's since walked that comment back, saying she meant the whole file was on her desk.
"Well, you know, the dog didn't just catch the car. The dog is now driving the car," said New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush.
He noted that for MAGA, the Epstein death prior to any kind of trial "forms a really important emotional and kind of cultural core to the whole thing, because it encapsulates a bunch of stray strands in American life that Trump himself has woven together distrust of authority, belief that there is a cabal that is running things secretly, and just a general sense that you have to have an outsider come in and smash up corrupt, perverted, monstrous plots that are being pulled off by people who aren't telling you the truth."
Bondi was the one who had a big ceremonial event where she handed out the so-called "Epstein binders." In the end, however, the right-wing influencers who got the binders discovered nothing was in them. Much of the information Bondi gave them was already publicly available, CBS News reported at the time. There were also huge swaths of information blacked out.
Former George W. Bush advisor Matthew Dowd said many are ascribing logic and "a rationality" to something that has none.
Dowd explained that it all ties back to the GOP's hate for Bill and Hillary Clinton, which "has gone on for decades and still exists." He said that the Epstein conspiracies all go back to the idea that Bill Clinton went to Epstein's island and "they couldn't let it go, even if they saw Donald Trump in the peripheral mirror with Jeffrey Epstein. They couldn't focus on that." Then, he said, Fox News fed the conspiracy theories, and it grew.
So, now they're looking for someone to blame.
Megyn Kelly said Tuesday that either Bondi is "lazy and incompetent, or she willingly humiliated some of the president's most loyal supporters."
However, Thrush said he's not certain that Bondi's "days are numbered," but noted that in her first several months, "she's had a bunch of shaky performances."
"I mean, it's comical. She doesn't have the sense of Washington self-protection," Thrush said. "She does have connections to Washington. She's been on the national political scene for a while, but she is not as well-versed in how to handle herself here."
Whereas Patel and Bongino, he said, "understand the social media ecosphere as well as anybody, and they have profited, like, literally profited from it."
"Bondi is a little bit of a deer in the headlights nationally with less experience," Thrush said. "She traffics more in her connections inside the west wing."
While he thinks she could make it through the incident, he said that if Trump starts to face criticism for not fulfilling his campaign promise to release the information, he could blame Bondi.
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