Sham, Slam, Thank You, Pam

“You’re siding with the perpetrators, and you’re ignoring the victims. That will be your legacy unless you act quickly to change course.” So said Rep. Jamie Raskin during an oversight hearing with Pam Bondi that devolved into a schoolyard fight. And when it comes to Bondi and the Epstein files, there are a lot of MAGA folks who would agree. But turning oversight committees into chaotic shouting matches certainly appears to be part of some bizarre strategy. To you, it probably looked like Bondi was crashing out, that the photo of her with her back toward Epstein victims was soulless, and that holding a burn book with canned personal attacks prepared for each questioner looked pathetic. But this show is for an audience of one, and the new goal in these oversight hearings is no oversight.

+ This hearing was similar to Bondi’s past performances. During the last one, the personal attacks “went for hours, a calculated performance that amounted to a giant middle finger to basic notions of decorum and accountability, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered, including a fundamental one that some of Bondi’s old friends and colleagues back home in Florida had been asking. As one of them put it to me: ‘I keep asking myself, What the f-ck happened to Pam?‘” (You could ask the same question about a lot of people these days…)