U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi attends a oversight hearing of Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 7, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday stonewalled a question at a Senate Judiciary Committee about who ordered FBI agents to flag any documents that mentioned President Donald Trump during a review this year of investigative files about the late sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Sen. Dick Durbin, in a letter in July, mentioned that purported order to FBI agents as he asked the Justice Department about past promises to release the Epstein files and a subsequent decision by Bondi not to do so.
“So, who gave the order to flag records related to President Trump?” Durbin, D-Ill., asked Bondi at Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing.
“To flag records which included his name?” Durbin asked.
Boni bristled as she answered, “I’m not going to discuss anything about that with you, senator.”
Durbin replied, “Eventually you’re going to have to answer for your conduct in this, you won’t do it today, but eventually you will.”
Durbin, in his letter to the Justice Department, said that in March, hundreds of personnel in the New York field office of the FBI were assigned to review files related to Epstein.
In that letter, Durbin cited a quote by Trump in 2002 about Epstein, which was published in New York magazine.
“Mr. Trump said of Mr. Epstein, ‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,’ ” Durbin wrote.
Durbin on Tuesday also asked Bondi why, in February, she had said that the so-called Epstein client list was sitting on her desk for her to review, when she eventually said she would not release the Epstein files.
“I said I had not yet reviewed it, and if you see our memo on Epstein, you will see our memo on Epstein clearly points out that there was no client list,” Bondi replied.
That joint Justice Department and FBI memo was released on July 7, months after the review of Epstein file documents.
It concluded that there was no Epstein client list, and supported the long-standing official finding that Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail in Manhattan in 2019, weeks after being arrested on child sex trafficking charges.
The Trump administration, for months, has faced criticism, including by some Republican allies in Congress, for its reneging on promises by Bondi and FBI officials to release the Epstein files.
Some supporters of Trump have refused to believe there was no Epstein client list, which they suspect was a list of powerful or wealthy men who had sexual contact with girls and young women under his control, making those men vulnerable to blackmail or other pressure.
Trump had been friends with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell for years before the two men fell out in the mid-2000s.
Maxwell was convicted in 2022 at a federal trial in New York of charges related to procuring and grooming underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear Maxwell’s appeal of that conviction.
