US Attorney General Pam Bondi takes her seat before testifying before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Oversight of the Department of Justice” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on Feb. 11, 2026.
Roberto Schmidt | AFP | Getty Images
Attorney General Pam Bondi at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday seemed to have a printout of Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s history of searches of the Department of Justice’s database of documents related to the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Photos of a black binder that Bondi had at the hearing showed the words “Jayapal Pramila Search History” and a list of documents whose numbers coincide with the number of Epstein files.
Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat, and other members of Congress have visited the DOJ in recent days to view documents related to Epstein that are not available to the public.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi holds a piece of paper labelled “Jayapal Pramila Search History”, in reference to U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, during the committee’s hearing on oversight of the Justice Department, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., Feb. 11, 2026.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Jayapal is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, and during Wednesday’s hearing she had a contentous exchange with Bondi after asking survivors of Epstein’s abuse — who were present at the hearing — to stand and indicate if they had been unable to meet with the DOJ.
Multiple women stood and raised their hands.
“I’m not gonna get in the gutter for her theatrics,” Bondi said, when Jayapal asked her to apologize to the victims for the DOJ’s failure to fully redact their names when the files were released to the public.
After the hearing, Jayapal told MS Now’s Ali Velshi that she believes Bondi had her search history.
Jayapal told MS Now that she had assumed that her searches would be viewable by DOJ, but not that they would be used to prepare Bondi for her testimony Wednesday.
“It’s totally inappropriate,” Jayapal told MS Now.
“Is this is [the] whole reason they opened [the files] up to us two days early? So they could essentially surveil members to see what we were gonna ask her about?” Jayapal asked.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to CNBC when asked if Bondi had a printout of the congresswoman’s search history, why she might have had it, or if the DOJ kept track of searches by other members of Congress.