Bondi

March 31 (UPI) — Three former FBI agents filed a lawsuit against FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi and their departments Tuesday for firing them, claiming it was for political retribution.

The suit includes a proposed class-action of all FBI employees already fired or potentially fired in the future for political reasons. It was filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C.

Former FBI agents Jamie Garman, Blaire Toleman and Michelle Ball served on a public corruption squad at the FBI that investigated President Donald Trump‘s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Special counsel Jack Smith eventually took over the investigation code named Arctic Frost. He dropped the charges against Trump after he was elected in 2024.

The three agents were fired last fall.

“Our removal from federal service — without due process and based on a false perception of political bias — is a profound injustice that raises serious concerns about political interference in federal law enforcement,” they said in a statement released by their lawyer, Daniel M. Eisenberg. “We bring this lawsuit to protect the rule of law and to allow our former colleagues to do their jobs without fear of retaliation.”

A federal judge will have to decide if the case can be a class-action suit. The three agents are seeking to include more than 50 FBI employees who have been fired since Trump took office.

Since taking control of the FBI in February 2025, Patel and the other defendants “have summarily terminated members of the proposed class because of their perceived political affiliation, without legitimate investigation, finding of misconduct, pre-termination notice of charges to the employees, an opportunity for the employees to present a defense, and/or any compelling or exigent circumstances,” the suit said.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a speech that Patel had “cleaned house” at the FBI.

“There isn’t a single man or woman with a gun, federal agent, still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump,” the lawsuit alleges Blanche said.

WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday stormed out of a closed-door briefing on the Jeffrey Epstein files by Justice Department leaders, and said they would push to force Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to answer questions under oath about the case that has plagued the Trump administration.

Bondi and Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche went to Capitol Hill to try to quell bipartisan frustration over the Justice Department’s handling of millions of files related to Epstein’s sex trafficking investigation.

But less than an hour into the briefing, Democrats walked out in protest of the arrangement and said they would press to enforce a subpoena for Bondi to appear for a sworn deposition next month.

“We want her under oath because we do not trust her,” said Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost.

Asked by reporters after the briefing whether she would comply with the subpoena, Bondi said, “I made it crystal clear I will follow the law.” She also defended the department’s handling of the Epstein files, saying officials are proud of their work to release millions of documents to the public.

The committee’s Republican chairman, Rep. James Comer, accused Democrats of political grandstanding.

“This for us, for the Republicans, it’s about getting answers,” Comer said after the briefing. “For the Democrats, it’s a political game, and they just demonstrated that today. There’s no reason for them to walk out and clutch their pearls and act like they were offended and outraged.”

Justice Department leaders had hoped the release of documents tied to the disgraced financier would put an end to a political saga that has dogged the president’s second term, but the agency remains consumed by questions and criticism over Epstein’s case and its management of the files. Bondi has accused Democrats of using the furor over the documents to distract from Trump’s political successes, even though some of the most vocal criticism has come from members of the president’s own party.

Five Republicans on the committee voted with Democrats to support the subpoena for Bondi to appear for a deposition on April 14. Lawmakers have accused the Justice Department of withholding too many files and criticized the agency for haphazard redactions that exposed intimate details about victims.

The Justice Department has called the subpoena “completely unnecessary,” noting that members of Congress have been invited to view unredacted files at the Justice Department and that department leaders have made themselves available to answer questions from lawmakers.

The department has sought to assure lawmakers and the public that there has been no effort to shield President Trump, who says he cut ties with Epstein years ago after an earlier friendship, or any other high-profile figures close to Epstein from potential embarrassment. Justice Department leaders have also rejected suggestions that they have ignored victims and insist that while there is no evidence in the files to prosecute anyone else, they remain committed to investigating should new information come forward.

“I’m not trying to defend Epstein — I’m not,” Blanche said in an interview this week with Katie Miller, who is married to top Trump advisor Stephen Miller. “I do defend the work that this department is doing today, right now, which is going after every single perpetrator anyway, and if there is a narrative that exists that we are ignoring Epstein victims, that is false.”

The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted after months of public and political pressure that requires the government to open its files on the late financier and his confidant and onetime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell, 64, was convicted in December 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role over a decade in sexually exploiting and abusing underage girls with Epstein.

Criminal investigations into the financier have long animated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and others who have suspected government cover-ups and clamored for a full accounting.

After missing a Dec. 19 deadline set by Congress to release all the files, the Justice Department said it tasked hundreds of lawyers with reviewing the records to determine what needed to be redacted, or blacked out. The Justice Department in January said it was releasing more than 3 million pages of documents along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.

Richer and Groves write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi was subpoenaed Tuesday to answer questions from Congress about the Justice Department’s sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and the agency’s handling of millions of files related to the disgraced financier.

Bondi was ordered to appear for a deposition on April 14 by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform after a vote earlier this month that five Republicans supported.

The Justice Department’s failure to fend off the subpoena from the Republican-led committee underscores widespread discontent among President Trump’s own base over Bondi’s management of the review and release of a trove of documents from the criminal investigation into Epstein.

“The Committee has questions regarding the Department of Justice’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his associates and its compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” Rep. James Comer, the Republican chairman, said in a letter to Bondi.

“As Attorney General, you are directly responsible for overseeing the Department’s collection, review, and determinations regarding the release of files pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the Committee therefore believes that you possess valuable insight into these efforts,” he wrote.

The department on Tuesday called the subpoena “completely unnecessary.” Bondi and Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche were expected to provide a private briefing Wednesday to members of the committee.

“Lawmakers have been invited to view the unredacted files for themselves at the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General has always made herself available to speak directly with members of Congress,” the department said in a statement. The agency said it looks forward to “continuing to provide policymakers with the facts.”

The Trump administration has faced constant political headaches since the rollout of the files began in December, with critics accusing the department of hiding certain documents and over-redacting files. In other cases, victims have slammed the department for sloppy redactions that revealed their sensitive information.

The Justice Department has fiercely defended its handling of the Epstein files, saying it worked as quickly and diligently as possible to review and release millions of documents required under the law. The department has denied any accusations that it used redactions to protect certain people or improperly withheld certain materials. And it has said it immediately worked to fix any redaction errors raised by victims.

Richer writes for the Associated Press.

President Trump was uncommonly lucky in his first term, neither inheriting nor provoking a crisis of the sort that tests U.S. presidents, until COVID struck in his final 10 months. (He failed that test, contributing to his 2020 reelection defeat.) Trump 1.0 was bequeathed a growing economy from President Obama, and the incoming president assembled a roster of capable advisors who often acted to prevent him from doing nutty things at home and abroad.

Trump 2.0 made sure that no such human guardrails populated his second Cabinet, only genuflecting enablers. Unrestrained, he has presided over one crisis on top of another, all of his own making. Tariff mayhem and high prices. Armed agents and troops in American cities. Repeated violations of court orders. Demolition at federal agencies and the White House.

And now Trump has taken the nation to war against Iran in league with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Depending on the moment and the audience, a contradictory Trump is either claiming the war is “very complete” or that much remains to be done to “decimate” Iran. On Wednesday he blithely told Axios, “Any time I want it to end, it will end,” even as U.S. officials planned further actions.

In any case, Trump’s war of choice and the killing of the supreme leader of Iran’s terroristic theocracy now has spawned another potential crisis, counterterrorism experts warn: the risks of retaliatory terrorist threats at home. And that is a threat, whether from homegrown extremists or sleeper cells of the sort that came alive for 9/11, that is likely greater because of the initial self-induced crisis of Trump’s second term: his whacking of the federal government.

Trump authorized Elon Musk’s destruction of the bureaucracy in the name of “government efficiency” and continues to exact retribution against any federal employee who had anything to do with investigating and prosecuting him during his interregnum. Longtime agents and operatives have been eliminated at the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, CIA and elsewhere. Especially at the FBI, counterterrorism experts with centuries of collective experience are gone and many who remain have been diverted to Trump’s top priority: mass deportations.

Consequently, the president who promised to “Make America Safe Again” has arguably made Americans less safe.

I raised this scary prospect just over a year ago as Trump’s teardown of the purported Deep State was underway. And now a Mideast war that Trump promised never to start has further incentivized Iran and its jihadi proxies to hit back, just as he’s diminished the nation’s early-warning systems.

Enough intelligence remains, however, that even in the days before Trump ordered the first strikes against Tehran, government analysts were picking up “worrisome signs” of Iranian plotting against U.S. targets, the New York Times reported. After the U.S.-Israel onslaught and death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, the government intercepted a possible Iranian “operational trigger” to “sleeper assets” outside Iran, according to ABC News.

Counterterrorism expert Colin P. Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, which focuses on global security and transnational terrorism, wrote this week in the Atlantic that U.S. agencies’ record of disrupting Iranian-backed plots in America was in jeopardy given the recent changes in funding, personnel and priorities. “Because of this,” he concluded, “the U.S. homeland is arguably more vulnerable than it has been in a long time.”

In a follow-up exchange of emails, Clarke told me, “Many of this administration’s moves have been myopic — shifting counterterrorism resources to immigration, firing FBI agents working counterintelligence, etc. A week before the U.S. went to war with Iran, the FBI Director Kash Patel was off gallivanting in Milan at the Olympics [where he struggled to chug a Michelob Ultra, a firing offense in its own right] when he should have been preparing for the potential for an Iranian response on U.S. soil.”

Patel’s preposterous partying with the U.S. men’s hockey team while war-planning was underway in Washington was widely, justifiably mocked. But it stands as a metaphor for the entire Trump administration’s cavalier attitude toward homeland security. Its abusive focus on both migrants and citizens protesting on the migrants’ behalf is a distraction from actual threats to the country.

Patel, like his boss at the Justice Department, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, has made plain in words and actions that the president’s political enemies are the real public enemies No. 1. One of Bondi’s first acts was creation of a “weaponization working group” to identify, fire or prosecute those in her department who’d investigated and prosecuted Trump, many of whom also had experience in domestic and transnational terrorism. The association representing FBI agents called her purges “dangerous distractions” from the work “to make America safe again.”

Days after starting the Iran war, when homeland security should have been on red alert, Trump fired his secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. Her costly cosplaying as the homeland’s heroine on horseback in anti-migrant videos, along with her penchant for luxury jets allegedly to transport deportees, was too much even for him.

Yet all three “national security” officials — Noem, Bondi and Patel — simply reflect Trump’s own warped approach and blasé attitude toward the homefront.

When Time magazine last week asked the commander in chief whether Americans should be worried about potential terrorist strikes at home, he replied, “I guess.”

“We plan for it,” he added. “But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

The administration is planning for it all right. An extraordinary number of senior Trump officials have taken up residence in houses on military bases, including Bondi, Noem, the secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, and White House consigliere Stephen Miller.

The rest of us just have to keep our fingers crossed. I guess.

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March 4 (UPI) — The House Oversight Committee voted Wednesday to subpoena U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify on the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Five Republicans joined the Democrats on the committee voting in favor of the subpoena by a 24-19 count.

The vote was forced by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., during a full committee business meeting that was not related to the Epstein investigation. Republicans joining Mace in voting for the subpoena were Reps. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Michael Cloud, R-Texas.

“AG Bondi claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein Files,” Mace posted on social media. “The record is clear: they have not.”

Potential dates for Bondi’s testimony have not been announced.

While some Republicans joined Democrats in voting for a subpoena of Bondi, they did not do the same on a subpoena for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. A motion to subpoena Noem for her handling of immigration enforcement failed.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick agreed on Tuesday to testify before the House Oversight Committee about his relationship with Epstein. Lutnick’s relationship with the sexual abuser and trafficker came under further scrutiny after a photo of him with Epstein was posted on the Justice Department’s Epstein files database.

Lutnick previously downplayed his ties to Epstein.