Pam

The first shot of director Lynne Ramsay’s stubborn and exasperating postpartum nightmare “Die My Love” would be a great opener for a horror movie. The camera lurks in the kitchen of an isolated ranch house, as still and foreboding as a ghost, while a couple named Grace and Jackson (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson) poke around the front porch of their newly inherited property. The two take several beats to go inside, long enough that we suspect these crazy kids are making a dangerous mistake. Just look at the wallpaper. Those florals would make anyone crack.

“It’s not New York but it’s ours,” Jackson says of the rural home, left to him by his uncle who died violently upstairs in a way that Grace finds hilarious. He grew up in the area and his parents, Pam and Harry (Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte), still live nearby. Neither Jackson nor Grace say anything about their past lives back in the city, but he yearns to play drums and she once claimed to write. There’s a sense that their dreams have stalled out, either due to finances, passion or talent. So they move in, have a baby and pivot to domestic chaos.

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Lawrence and Pattinson are such a natural, overdue pairing that it’s a surprise to realize this is the first time they’ve teamed up to make the kind of polarizing, go-for-broke prestige film they both enjoy. The two stars launched into the public consciousness roughly around the same time, then followed the same trajectory from teen franchise idols to creatively ambitious A-listers and now, more recently, newish parents making a movie about miserable parents whose hopes have run aground. Lawrence has two tots under 3; Pattinson, a toddler. Their kids shouldn’t watch this movie until college.

In a dynamic montage, Ramsay sets up their boyfriend-girlfriend pair as lusty but strange. Jackson and Grace flirt by fighting like wild beasts. Nuzzling, sniffing, biting, wrestling — that’s foreplay (and she’s more into it than he is). But they can’t communicate with words. “If you’re not feeling good, maybe we should, like … talk?” Jackson says tentatively to his increasingly restless and unstable partner. Grace isn’t interested in talking, though occasionally she’s game to scream. When they fight for real, their bodies twist into spasms of outrage. And when the other one isn’t looking, each seems to power down — Lawrence’s Grace physically collapsing like an unplugged air dancer — a clue of how much energy they must privately expend to make it work.

“Die My Love,” adapted by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from the 2012 novel by Argentine author Ariana Harwicz, makes parenthood feel like being handcuffed to an anchor that’s sinking into a swamp. Lawrence’s Grace needs help and the more she flails, the worse she makes things. The book is an inner monologue of poison: “How could a weak, perverse woman like me, someone who dreams of a knife in her hand, be the mother and wife of those two individuals?” the first paragraph seethes. But Ramsay rejects putting its angst into words. As with Joaquin Phoenix in “You Were Never Really Here,” she prefers characters who silently roil under their skin.

The tension in this home starts quiet — too quiet — with Grace cranking up kiddie albums by Alvin and the Chipmunks and Raffi to drown out whatever noise is happening in her head. After Jackson brings home a stray dog, the racket becomes unbearable, with sound designers Tim Burns and Paul Davies skillfully and cruelly making sure that no matter how far Grace roams, she can still hear the darned thing bark.

Lacking much perspective into Grace, we mostly see a mentally unwell woman incensed that her sexual playtime is over. She howls with the urge to mate, prowling the house in matching fancy bras and thong sets that clash with this disheveled house and its stockpile of cheap beer. Occasionally, a mysterious leather-clad biker (LaKeith Stanfield) speeds by, considering a quickie with this bored beauty.

Grace’s erotic agony is reductive and a bit ridiculous, although I think the script is also trying to imply that Grace herself is focused on the wrong problems. The film represents her depression by coating the night scenes in so much blue tint that even Picasso might suggest dialing it back. Despite cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s efforts to put us in her headspace with lenses that make the world blur and swirl around her, you’re more afraid of Grace than for Grace, especially when the shock editing has her smashing through doors like Michael Myers.

Hurling herself into every scene, Lawrence puts her full faith in Ramsay. It’s not a trust fall so much as a trust cannonball. As good and committed as Lawrence is, there were times I wanted to rescue her from her own movie, to protect her from the fate of Faye Dunaway when “Mommie Dearest” turned another blond Oscar winner into a joke.

Yet, this is a character who hates pity and I can’t help but admire that Ramsay faces down today’s phonily upbeat and relatable motherhood discourse with this boogey-mom who keeps herself aloof. Grace treats the older women in her family like a wall of advice to be tuned out even when they’re right. “Everybody goes a little loopy the first year,” Spacek’s Pam says, offering empathy that falls on deaf ears. (Spacek delivers a lovely, endearingly layered turn.) And while Grace is so lonely she literally claws the walls, she rejects any overture of friendship, either from a perky fellow parent (Sarah Lind) or a peppy cashier (Saylor McPherson) whose attempts to start a conversation go so badly that when the poor dear asks Grace if she’s found everything she’s looking for, Grace huffs, “In life?”

Pattinson has the more recessive role but his performance is so subtle and clever that it’s worth watching closely. His Jackson is pathetic, passive and skittish around his baby’s mother, who he both longs to heal and tries to avoid. He has a few moments that play so close to comedy — say, whining to be let into the bathroom — that you wish the movie would do more to encourage our pained, guttural laughs. The punchlines are there, such as a beat after one meltdown where Jackson admits he’s getting really stressed out and Grace coolly replies, “About what?”

There’s one scene in which Grace reveals a snippet of backstory that might explain her psychology, and I think that specificity is a narrative misstep. What’s powerful about Grace is that she’s howling for all parents, even the mostly happy ones. Harwicz’s book deliberately never gave her character a name.

Even inside this movie, Grace’s anguish is universal. Yes, she wanders into the wilderness at night, but so do her in-laws Harry and Pam, for reasons of their own.There are dark vibrations emanating from almost every character, even the minor ones, although Grace is too caught up in herself to take any comfort from that. But Ramsay is comfortable suggesting that everyone feels crazy and miserable. I suspect she thinks it’s the most normal way to live.

Democrats on the Senate panel grilled her over her leadership of the Justice Department. She hit back, with GOP support.

United States Attorney General Pam Bondi faced fierce questioning at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, as Democrats accused her of politicising the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Republicans rallied behind her pledge to restore law enforcement’s core mission.

In her first appearance before the Republican-controlled committee since the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, Bondi on Tuesday defended the department’s direction under her leadership, saying she came into office determined to end the “weaponisation of justice” and refocus on violent crime.

She said the DOJ was now “returning to our core mission of fighting real crime”, pointing to increased federal activity in Washington, DC; and Memphis, Tennessee.

Bondi also defended the deployment of National Guard troops to cities like Chicago and Portland, saying local governments failed to protect citizens. She tied challenges in enforcing public safety to the ongoing government shutdown, blaming Democrats for undermining law enforcement readiness.

One of the critical moments of the hearing came with Bondi’s justification for prosecuting Comey, a longtime critic of US President Donald Trump. Comey faces charges of false statements and obstruction of Congress related to his 2020 congressional testimony, and is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday. Democrats pressed whether the indictment followed from independent prosecutorial judgement or political pressure. Bondi declined to answer questions about private conversations with the White House, calling them “personnel matters”.

The Jeffrey Epstein files were another flashpoint in the hearing as Bondi repeatedly refused to explain her decision to reverse course on releasing documents. She instead accused Democratic senators of having accepted campaign donations from an affiliate of the late, convicted sex offender.

Democrats also quizzed her on allegations that Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover agents last year, before the current US administration came into office. Bondi said the decision to drop the inquiry preceded her tenure and declined to state whether the money had been recovered.

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the panel, repeatedly accused Bondi of using her leadership to help weaponise the DOJ. “Our nation’s top law enforcement agency has become a shield for the president and his political allies when they engage in misconduct,” he said. The Illinois senator claimed Bondi “fundamentally transformed the Justice Department and left an enormous stain on American history”.

“It will take decades to recover,” he added.

Under Bondi’s leadership, key divisions such as civil rights have seen mass departures, and career prosecutors tied to investigations into Trump or the January 6 attack on the US Capitol have been removed or reassigned.

A letter by nearly 300 former DOJ employees, released just before the hearing, warned that the administration was “taking a sledgehammer to other longstanding work” and urged a return to institutional norms.

Republicans on the committee largely defended her actions, echoing claims that the DOJ under the prior Biden administration — which brought two criminal cases against Trump — was the one that had been weaponised. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley commended Bondi for resetting priorities and asserted that law enforcement needed new direction.

WASHINGTON  — Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi struck a defiant tone Tuesday during a Senate hearing where she dodged a series of questions about brewing scandals that have dogged her agency.

Bondi, a Trump loyalist, refused to discuss her conversations with the White House about the recent indictment of former FBI Director James Comey and the deployment of federal troops to Democrat-run cities.

She deflected questions about an alleged bribery scheme involving the president’s border advisor and declined to elaborate on her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

In many instances, Bondi’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee devolved into personal attacks against Democrats, who expressed dismay at their inability to get her to answer their inquiries.

“This is supposed to be an oversight hearing in which members of Congress can get serious answers to serious questions about the cover-up of corruption about the prosecution of the president’s enemies,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said toward the end of the nearly five-hour hearing. “When will it be that the members of this committee on a bipartisan basis demand answers to those questions?”

Her testimony came as the Justice Department faces increased accusations that it is being weaponized against President Trump’s political foes.

It marked a continuation of what has become a hallmark of not just Bondi, but most of Trump’s top officials. When pressed on potential scandals that the president has taken great pains to publicly avoid, they almost universally turn to one tactic: ignore and attack the questioner.

That strategy was shown in an exchange between Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who wanted to know who decided to close an investigation into Trump border advisor Tom Homan. Homan reportedly accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents after indicating he could get them government contracts. Bondi declined to say and shifted the focus to Padilla.

“I wish that you loved your state of California as much as you hate President Trump,” Bondi said. “We’d be in really good shape then because violent crime in California is currently 35% higher than the national average.”

In between partisan attacks, the congressional hearing allowed Bondi to boast about her eight months in office. She said her focus has been on combating illegal immigration, violent crime and restoring public trust in the Justice Department, which she said Biden-era officials weaponized against Trump.

“They wanted to take President Trump off the playing field,” she said about the effort to indict Trump. “This is the kind of conduct that shatters the American people’s faith in our law enforcement system. We will work to earn that back every single day. We are returning to our core mission of fighting real crime.”

She defended the administration’s deployment of federal troops to Washington, D.C., and Chicago, where she said troops had been sent on Tuesday. Bondi declined to say whether the White House consulted her on the deployment of troops to American cities but said the effort is meant to “protect” citizens from violent crime.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked about the legal justification for the military shooting vessels crossing the Carribbean Sea off Venezuela. The administration has said the boats are carrying drugs, but Coons told Bondi that “Congress has never authorized such a use of military force.”

“It’s unclear to me how the administration has concluded that the strikes are legal,” Coons said.

Bondi told Coons she would not discuss the legal advice her department has given to the president on the matter but said Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “is a narcoterrorist,” and that “drugs coming from Venezuela are killing our children at record levels.”

Coons said he was “gravely concerned” that she was not leading a department that is making decisions that are in “keeping with the core values of the Constitution.” As another example, he pointed to Trump urging her to prosecute his political adversaries, such as Comey.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) the top Democrat on the committee, raised a similar concern at the beginning of the hearing, saying Bondi has “systematically weaponized our nation’s leading law enforcement agency to protect President Trump and his allies.”

“In eight short months, you have fundamentally transformed the Justice Department and left an enormous stain on American history,” Durbin said. “It will take decades to recover.”

Oct. 7 (UPI) — Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, and refused to answer questions on several topics.

Bondi declined to answer questions about the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey regarding her discussions with President Donald Trump as well as the firings of Department of Justice attorneys who worked on Jan. 6 cases and her refusal to prosecute certain cases of Trump’s allies.

Bondi also avoided questions about the files of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Trump’s alleged friendship with him. She responded that the Democrats should explain their own relationships with him, CNN reported.

Sen Richard Blumenthal, D-N.Y., said Bondi’s testimony was a new low for attorneys general.

“Her apparent strategy is to attack and conceal. Frankly, I’ve been through close to 15 of these attorney general accountability hearings, and I have never seen anything close to it in terms of the combativeness, the evasiveness and sometimes deceptiveness,” Blumenthal told reporters after leaving the hearing. “I think it is possibly a new low for attorneys general testifying before the United States Congress, and I just hope my Republican colleagues will demand more accountability than what we have seen so far.”

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., agreed with Blumenthal.

“She was fully prepared for, with specific and personal comebacks, accusing various of my colleagues, of challenging their integrity or challenging their basis for their questions in a way I’ve not ever seen,” Coons said.

The White House has already praised Bondi’s performance.

“She’s doing great,” a White House official told CNN. “Not only is the AG debunking every single bogus Democrat talking point, but she’s highlighting the Democrats’ own hypocrisy and they have no response.”

Bondi, along with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, criticized the judge in the case of Sophie Roske, the woman who planned an attack on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Roske, who called the police on herself before making contact with Kavanaugh, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the plot.

“My prosecutors did an incredible job on that case,” Bondi said. She said the Justice Department would appeal the sentence, which was 22 years below the federal guidelines and the minimum sentence prosecutors wanted. “The judge also would not refer to the defendant by his biological name,” Bondi said. Roske is transgender.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked Bondi what conversations she has had with the White House about investigations into Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Comey. Bondi again declined to answer.

“I’m not going to discuss any conversations,” Bondi said to Klobuchar, CBS News reported.

Klobuchar asked her about a Truth Social post by Trump last in which he asked Bondi why she hadn’t brought charges against Comey, Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“President Trump is the most transparent president in American history, and I don’t think he said anything that he hasn’t said for years,” Bondi said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., pressed her on whether the FBI found any pictures of Trump “with half-naked young women,” saying that Epstein was reported to have shown them around.

“You know, Sen. Whitehouse? You sit here and make salacious remarks, once again, trying to slander President Trump, left and right, when you’re the one who was taking money from one of Epstein’s closest confidants,” Bondi responded, referring to tech entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who has said he regretted his contacts with Epstein, CBS reported.

Since Bondi took over at the Justice Department, she and her team have fired prosecutors who worked on capitol riot cases and pushed out career FBI agents.

The Public Integrity Section is nearly empty now, and more than 70% of the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division are also gone, NPR reported.

In a letter Monday, nearly 300 former Justice Department employees asked the Oversight Committee to closely monitor the department.

“We call on Congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities far more vigorously. Members in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle must provide a meaningful check on the abuses we’re witnessing,” the letter said.

The letter also alleged poor treatment of staff.

“As for its treatment of its employees, the current leadership’s behavior has been appalling. … And demonizing, firing, demoting, involuntarily transferring, and directing employees to violate their ethical duties has already caused an exodus of over 5,000 of us — draining the Department of priceless institutional knowledge and expertise, and impairing its historical success in recruiting top talent. We may feel the effects of this for generations.”

Bondi said the DOJ stands by the “many terminations” in the department since Trump took office. “We stand by all of those,” she said.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in an opening statement, “What has taken place since Jan. 20, 2025, would make even President Nixon recoil.”

Durbin said Bondi has left “an enormous stain in American history.”

“It will take decades to recover,” he said.

The hearing is just two weeks after she sought and secured an indictment of Comey at the direction of the president. Democrats have said she’s weaponizing the Department of Justice, breaking with the longstanding tradition of keeping the department independent of political goals.

Comey was indicted on one count each of lying to Congress and obstructing justice for his testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020. Before the indictment, U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert refused to indict because of a lack of evidence against Comey. Trump accused him of waiting too long to indict and nearly allowing the statute of limitations to run out. Siebert resigned under pressure from the administration.

Last week, Durbin said the targeting of Trump’s political enemies is “a code-red alarm for the rule of law” in a floor speech, The Washington Post reported.

“Never in the history of our country has a president so brazenly demanded the baseless prosecution of his rivals,” he said. “And he doesn’t even try to hide it.”

But Republicans claim that Bondi’s leadership is necessary after years of what they say was politicized attacks from the Justice Department under the President Joe Biden administration.

“If the facts and the evidence support the finding that Comey lied to Congress and obstructed our work, he ought to be held accountable,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chair of the Judiciary Committee.

During her confirmation hearing, Bondi vowed that weaponization of the Justice Department is over.

“I will not politicize that office,” Bondi said at the time. “I will not target people simply because of their political affiliation.”

United States Attorney General Pam Bondi has emerged as one of the most embattled top officials in the administration of United States President Donald Trump, amid fallout over her handling of disclosures related to the sex trafficking case of billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump has so far stood by Bondi, who has been instrumental in his reshaping of the Department of Justice, but the president has continued to voice frustration that public fixation on the scandal – and criticism from both within his base and among his opponents – has refused to die down.

Democrats have adopted the issue as their latest political cudgel, while Republicans in Congress have promised to continue their own probe when they return from summer recess, with plans to hear testimony from Bondi, as well as subpoena the case files and testimony from Epstein confidant Ghislaine Maxwell.

Two lawmakers are even pushing a bill that would compel Bondi to release the documents in question, a move Republican Thomas Massie has said is aimed at “justice for the victims and transparency for Americans”.

So who is Bondi and how did the 59-year-old attorney general come to be one of Trump’s most loyal cabinet members?

What did Bondi do before becoming attorney general?

Bondi spent 18 years as a public prosecutor in Hillsborough County, Florida before breaking into statewide office.

The lengthy career gave her more direct prosecutorial experience than any preceding US attorney general, according to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group that has had an outsized role in shaping the policy of Trump’s second term.

Speaking last year to the Tampa Bay Times, former colleagues recounted Bondi’s reputation for jury-turning charisma that saw her quickly rise through the ranks of felony prosecutions.

But it was regular media appearances as a legal analyst on national news networks that helped her to build public recognition, which was credited with her victory in Florida’s open attorney general race in 2010. Bondi, who took office in 2011, was also buoyed by the endorsement of former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

As attorney general, Bondi led crusades against so-called “pill mills”, clinics that loosely prescribe pain medications, while leading some Republican pet causes, including a multi-state effort to overturn former President Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act.

She also led efforts to uphold Florida’s ban on same sex marriage, before its nationwide legalisation by Supreme Court order in 2015, as well as the ability for same sex couples to adopt.

During that period, Bondi sought to establish herself as a champion against sex trafficking and child sex abuse, launching the state’s council on human trafficking and an investigation into past abuse by Catholic priests.

As Florida’s top cop, she also had her first brush with Epstein, with critics accusing her of remaining willfully silent on a controversial non-prosecution agreement Epstein and his co-conspirators had struck with her predecessor.

They have said Bondi could have intervened as victims launched lawsuits challenging the deal, which saw Epstein plead guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution but serve only months in prison.

“But Bondi kept her distance from the state’s most prominent sex-trafficking case, even as Epstein’s victims pleaded with the courts to invalidate provisions of his non-prosecution agreement and filed lawsuits alleging he abused them when he was on work release from jail,” wrote Mary Ellen Klas, a Bloomberg opinion writer and former Miami Herald Bureau Chief.

“Her inaction helped to perpetuate what victims describe as a government cover-up that, along with Epstein’s death, has robbed those victims of their chance to get answers and hold their abusers to account,” she wrote.

How did Bondi enter Trump’s orbit?

Bondi’s connections with Trump drew scrutiny even before he entered office, after it was revealed in 2016 that authorities had launched an ethics probe related to the soon-to-be president. At question was whether Bondi had solicited contributions from Trump in 2013, as her office was weighing joining a lawsuit against Trump University.

Her office denied any wrongdoing, and the investigation was later dropped.

Despite those early contacts, Bondi was not an early adherent to Trump’s presidential ambitions or his nascent “Make America Great Again” movement.

Instead, she initially supported former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the 2016 Republican primary. When Jeb dropped out of the race, she threw her lot in with Trump. From there, things accelerated quickly.

While still Florida’s attorney general, Bondi served on Trump’s first White House transition team. She left her post in Florida in 2019 and soon joined the Ballard Lobbyist group, representing the interests of Amazon, General Motors, and Uber, among others.

From there, she joined the White House legal team, defending the president during his first impeachment trial in the US Senate, in which Trump was accused of conditioning weapons to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on then political opponent Biden.

After Trump’s election loss, Bondi was among those spearheading unfounded claims that the vote was marred by widespread fraud. She helped coordinate former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s infamous news conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she flatly and falsely claimed that Trump had “won Pennsylvania”.

She went on to chair the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a pro-Trump think tank that oversaw “a series of concerning lawsuits in recent years, particularly in the voting rights and elections arena”, as described by the Brennan Center for Justice. Publicly, she also floated prosecuting career federal law enforcement officials who investigated Trump.

In criticising her appointment, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee in January said that Bondi had “the ultimate qualification” to be Trump’s attorney general: “loyalty”.

Bondi’s tenure at the Justice Department

That loyalty has generated much consternation since Bondi took office, with opponents accusing her of shaping the country’s top law enforcement agency in Trump’s likeness.

That has included hundreds of layoffs at the department, including investigators and prosecutors in the two federal criminal cases lodged against Trump before his November election victory last year.

She has also launched a task force to probe those investigations, while publicly decrying what she has framed as a conspiracy against Trump amid the career staff, saying the staff of the FBI and Justice Department were rife with employees “who despise Donald Trump, despise us”, as she told Fox News.

More recently, she launched a strike force to investigate how the intelligence community, under former President Obama, handled information related to Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, in what some have seen as an attempt to distract from the Epstein imbroglio.

She has also announced a misconduct complaint against federal Judge James Boasberg, escalating a standoff over judges who have ruled against Trump’s early actions, most notably his use of the Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport alleged Venezuelan gang members with little requirement for proof.

But it was Bondi’s embrace of theories pushed by Trump’s staunchest supporters that has landed her in the current predicament. In February, she brazenly told Fox News that she had Epstein’s long-sought “client list” – thought to contain the names of the powerful figures the billionaire blackmailed via his sex scheme – “sitting on my desk right now”.

Months later, the White House would say Bondi was referring to the entirety of Epstein’s case files, and not specifically the list long sought by MAGA’s most influential voices.

That came shortly after the Justice Department in July released a memo, stating flatly: “This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list’”.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi suggested Tuesday that she has no plans to step down as she dodged questions about Jeffrey Epstein and her clash with a top FBI official, seeking to press ahead with a business-as-usual approach in the face of right-wing outrage that has plunged the Justice Department into turmoil.

Pressed by reporters during an announcement touting drug seizures, Bondi sidestepped questions about the fallout of the Trump administration’s decision not to release more records related to the wealthy financier’s sex trafficking investigation that has angered high profile members of President Trump’s base. With some calling for her resignation, Bondi made clear she intends to remain attorney general.

“I’m going to be here for as long as the president wants to be here,” Bondi said. “And I believe he’s made that crystal clear.”

The announcement at the Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters of recent methamphetamine and fentanyl seizures represents an effort by Bondi to turn the page on the Epstein controversy and show that the Justice Department is forging ahead after days of mounting criticism from figures in the MAGA movement furious over the administration’s failure to deliver long-sought government secrets about Epstein. But her refusal to address the turmoil may only further frustrate conservative influencers who have been calling for transparency and accountability over the wealthy financier’s case.

“This today is about fentanyl overdoses throughout our country and people who have lost loved ones to fentanyl,” Bondi said in response to a question from a reporter about the Epstein files. “That’s the message that we’re here to send today. I’m not going to talk about Epstein.”

Trump has been seeking to tamp down criticism of his attorney general and defended her again earlier Tuesday, saying she handled the matter “very well.” Trump said it’s up to her whether to release any more records, adding that “whatever she thinks is credible, she should release.”

Asked about Trump’s comment, Bondi said the Justice Department memo released last week announcing that no additional evidence would become public “speaks for itself and we’ll get back to you on anything else.”

The turmoil over the department’s handling of the Epstein matter spilled into public view last week with reports of a internal clash between Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Part of the dispute centered on a story from the news organization NewsNation that cited a “source close to the White House” as saying the FBI would have released the Epstein files months ago if it could have done so on its own. The story included statements from Bondi, Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel refuting the premise, but not Bongino.

Asked Tuesday whether she believes Bongino should remain in his role, Bondi said only that she would not discuss personnel matters. Bondi stressed that she had spent the morning with Patel, adding that: “I think we all are committed to working together now to make America safe again and that’s what we’re doing.”

Bondi had already been under scrutiny after an earlier document release in February that she hyped and handed out in binders to conservative influencers at the White House lacked any new revelations. When that first release flopped, Bondi accused officials of withholding files from her and claimed that the FBI later turned over a “truckload” of evidence with thousands of pages of additional documents.

Despite promises that more files were on their way to the public, however, the Justice Department determined after a months-long review that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” according to the memo released last week.

Richer writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and FBI are struggling to contain the fallout and appease the demands of far-right conservative personalities and influential members of President Trump’s base after the administration’s decision this week to withhold records from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation.

The move, which included the acknowledgment that one particular sought-after document never existed in the first place, sparked a contentious conversation between Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino at the White House earlier this week — threatening to shatter relations between the two law enforcement leaders. It centered in part on a news story by a conservative outlet that described divisions between the FBI and the Justice Department.

The cascade of disappointment and disbelief arising from the refusal to disclose additional, much-hyped records from the Epstein investigation lays bare the struggles of FBI and Justice Department leaders to resolve the conspiracy theories and amped-up expectations that they themselves had stoked with claims of a cover-up and hidden evidence. Infuriated by the failure of officials to unlock, as promised, the secrets of the so-called deep state, Trump supporters on the far right have grown restless and even demanded change at the top.

Tensions that simmered for months boiled over on Monday when the Justice Department and FBI issued a two-page statement saying that they had concluded that Epstein did not possess a “client list,” even though Bondi had intimated in February that such a document was sitting on her desk. The statement also said that they had decided against releasing any additional records from the investigation.

The department did disclose a video meant to prove that Epstein killed himself in jail, but even that raised eyebrows of conspiracy theorists because of a missing minute in the recording.

It was hardly the first time that Trump administration officials have failed to fulfill their pledge to deliver the evidence they expected.

In February, conservative influencers were invited to the White House and provided with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained documents that had largely already been in the public domain.

After the first release fell flat, Bondi said officials were poring over a “truckload” of previously withheld evidence she said had been handed over by the FBI.

But after a months-long review of evidence in the government’s possession, the Justice Department determined in the memo Monday that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” the memo says. The department noted that much of the material was placed under seal by a court to protect victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”

The Trump administration had hoped that statement would be the final word on the saga, with Trump chiding a reporter who asked Bondi about the Epstein case at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

But Bondi and Bongino had a contentious exchange the following day at the White House, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation.

Part of the clash centered on a story from NewsNation, a right-leaning news organization, that cited a “source close to the White House” as saying the FBI would have released the Epstein files months ago if it could have done so on its own. The story included statements from Bondi, Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel refuting the premise, but not Bongino.

The news publication Axios was first to describe the conversation.

Blanche sought to stem the fallout Friday with a social media post in which he said he had worked closely with Patel and Bongino on the Epstein matter and the joint memo.

“All of us signed off on the contents of the memo and the conclusions stated in the memo. The suggestion by anyone that there was any daylight between the FBI and DOJ leadership on this memo’s composition and release is patently false,” he wrote on X.

Also on Friday, far-right activist Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, posted on X that she was told that Bongino was “seriously thinking about resigning” and had taken the day off to contemplate his future. Bongino is normally an active presence on social media but has been silent since Wednesday.

The FBI did not respond to a request seeking comment and the White House sought in a statement to minimize any tensions.

“President Trump has assembled a highly qualified and experienced law-and-order team dedicated to protecting Americans, holding criminals accountable and delivering justice to victims,” said spokesman Harrison Fields. “This work is being carried out seamlessly and with unity. Any attempt to sow division within this team is baseless and distracts from the real progress being made in restoring public safety and pursuing justice for all.”

Tucker writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.