'Bungled this case': Trump White House advisers 'frustrated' with Pam Bondi move
Ever since the Justice Department announced in a memo on Sunday that they have definitively concluded financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide and there was no "client list" detailing rich and powerful people who were involved with him, the MAGA movement has been in civil war, with many far-right figures including Laura Loomer calling for Attorney General Pam Bondi's termination — and according to CNN's Alayna Treene on Wednesday morning, many White House officials are privately enraged with Bondi.
"This just doesn't seem to be going away," said anchor John Berman.
"Yeah ... and it's not just, you know, people who are in the MAGA movement in the president's base," said Treene. "There's a lot of people as well inside the White House, the president's own officials, who are increasingly frustrated with how not just the Justice Department, but specifically Attorney General Pam Bondi, has handled this."
"I spoke with one Trump adviser," Treene continued. "They said that Bondi had bungled this case from the start by overpromising some of the findings that they were anticipating. Another adviser told me that this was a political nightmare, questioning why they released this at this point in time and the way in which they did it. Again, releasing this a short memo and also leaking it to a certain media outlet."
A big issue, she added, is that Bondi claimed in February that the Epstein client list, which the DOJ now says doesn't exist, was "sitting on my desk" for review. Bondi has tried to backtrack by claiming she just meant the case file on Epstein — an answer that her critics find inadequate.
"We talked to a lot of different people following Bondi's answer there yesterday in that Cabinet room who said, essentially, they are not satisfied by that answer, particularly given so many people in the MAGA movement, so many of the president's supporters, and including even some people in his own administration, had previously argued that there were so much more to this case, particularly wanting to unearth potential accomplices to Jeffrey Epstein," said Treene.
Trump himself, who was briefed on the findings before they were made public, does not share his subordinates' anger with Bondi, Treene noted, and he has sought to downplay all of this as not important. "But still, a lot of people inside the White House not exactly happy with how this all played out."
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