Attorney General Pam Bondi threw a bone to Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theorists last month, but it’s looking increasingly doubtful that the AG has any evidence to back up her claims.
When she was speaking to reporters at the White House in May, Bondi was asked to respond to a GOP congressman’s suggestion that the Department of Justice might have lost documents related to the disgraced financier. She denied the accusation and proceeded to drop a bombshell about the DOJ’s investigation.
“The FBI, they’re reviewing, there are tens of thousands of Epstein with children or child porn. There are hundreds of victims and no one victim will ever get released,” Bondi said.
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“It’s just the volume. And that’s what they’re going through right now. The FBI is diligently going through that,” the AG continued.
Bondi’s comments immediately attracted widespread attention among President Donald Trump’s supporters, many of whom were left disappointed by the DOJ’s Epstein document dump in February. The documents released then—including “declassified” binders which were handed out to a group of conservative influencers—were panned as “boring” and a “total joke” by conservative commentators.
However, an AP News investigation published on Tuesday called into question the idea that Bondi is sitting on a mountain of Epstein videos that she will soon feed to the MAGA base. The AP interviewed lawyers and law enforcement officials involved in Epstein’s numerous criminal cases, none of whom could confirm the existence of unseen Epstein videos. A review of court documents from the prosecutions of Epstein and his socialite girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell also turned up empty.
The one clue that the AP found involved an obscure court filing from a 2023 civil case filed by a “Jane Doe 1” against Epstein’s estate. In the filing, the government had reached an agreement with Epstein’s lawyers concerning “videorecorded materials and photographs” which were in Epstein’s possession. The lawyers for Epstein’s estate notified the government of the possible existence of child pornography within those videos, and agreed to inform the FBI if such material was indeed found.
Yet even that morsel of insight remains “shrouded in secrecy” due to a protective order in the civil case. Even further, FBI Director Kash Patel seemed to deny that the FBI has unseen Epstein-related evidence in an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this month.
“If there was a video of some guy or gal committing felonies on an island and I’m in charge, don’t you think you’d see it?” Patel asked the podcast host.
The Epstein case has fascinated onlookers for years, from his unexpected 2019 suicide in jail to his links to politicians like Trump and Bill Clinton. How far Bondi and the DOJ will go to try to deliver more sensational Epstein headlines, with questionable evidence behind them, remains to be seen.
A spokesperson for the DOJ declined to comment for this story.
