Taking up the prospect that the members of Congress could file charges of inherent contempt against Attorney General Pam Bondi over her slow-walking the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance warned she is putting her legal career at serious risk.
On her Substack platform, Vance explained that inherent contempt is an appropriate and necessary threat to make in order to get Bondi, a former Florida AG and lobbyist, to comply with the law signed by none other than Donald Trump.
“Bondi could be fined $5,000 a day, each day, for as long as DOJ fails to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Action,“ Vance wrote. “Whether Bondi would respond is uncertain, perhaps even unlikely, but inherent contempt would be a modest first step toward getting the administration to comply with the law and release the files.”
Should she fail to comply, that could put her on the road to one day being disbarred like former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who saw his own career as a lawyer and lobbyist end after his law license was pulled for doing Trump’s bidding.
Should Bondi continue balking at demands from Congress, Vance wrote, that there likely would be enough support among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to impeach the AG over the withholding of the Epstein files — one of the rare times where Republicans have broken with the Trump administration.
“At the end of the day, Bondi has a law license to worry about," Vance wrote. "The cautionary tale of state bars that disbarred lawyers like Rudy Giuliani who strayed too far from their ethical obligations as lawyers in service of Trump during his first term should weigh heavily on anyone who hopes to have a future, post-Trump.”
She added that, while inherent contempt has been used since 1935, “it may be that Congress should decline to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and reemploy this practicable solution to what otherwise appears to be an intractable problem. Epstein’s survivors deserve justice.”
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