House panel votes to subpoena Pam Bondi over Epstein files

On Wednesday, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the department's handling of records related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The motion to subpoena Bondi passed by a vote of 24-19. Five Republicans voted in favor of the subpoena, including Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who put forward the motion, News.Az reports, citing NBC news.

The Republicans voting with Mace and the Democrats were: Reps. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Michael Cloud of Texas, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"AG Bondi claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein files. The record is clear: they have not," Mace wrote in a post on X.

“The Epstein case is one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. His global sex trafficking network is larger than what is being revealed. Three million documents have been released, and we still don’t have the full truth. Videos are missing. Audio is missing. Logs are missing. There are millions more documents out there. We want to know why the DOJ is more focused on shielding the powerful than delivering justice.”

Speaking to reporters after the vote, Mace said, “I know that Bondi has testified before the Judiciary Committee, but she’s not testified before me or the Oversight Committee. I need to get to the bottom of this for other survivors of Jeffrey Epstein."

“I have a lot more questions, and I don’t expect to be talking about the stock market, so she better not bring those notes when she comes to the Oversight Committee,” Mace said, referencing Bondi's contentious hearing with the House Judiciary Committee last month during which the attorney general brought up the stock market's performance under President Donald Trump.

Mace said the subpoena is for a closed-door testimony with video that would be released to the public afterward. There’s not yet a date for Bondi's testimony.

At last month's House Judiciary Committee hearing, Bondi touted the Justice Department’s efforts at complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated the public release of most information from the investigative files into Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

“More than 500 attorneys and reviewers spent thousands of hours painstakingly reviewing millions of pages to comply with Congress’s law. We’ve released more than 3 million pages, including 180,000 images, all to the public, while doing our very best in the time frame allotted by the legislation to protect victims,” Bondi said then.

News.Az 

By Ulviyya Salmanli