Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that Kash Patel’s FBI was “trying to destroy her” by leaking information about the battle raging within the Trump administration over the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Bondi has faced months of criticism over the failure to provide new revelations in the case, which White House officials mistakenly thought would blow over quickly, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal.
A series of key missteps has helped keep what is arguably President Donald Trump’s most-hated issue squarely in the spotlight, with many of the MAGA faithful blaming Bondi for the fiasco and demanding she be fired.
When Bondi complained to the White House about the criticism, Trump essentially told her to toughen up, according to the Journal. Other officials told her to stop looking at social media and lashing out at the people who were posting.
But Bondi told White House officials that FBI leadership, including Patel, was out to get her and was leaking information about internal disputes. Administration officials who tried to broker peace concluded the situation had gotten out of control because both sides had screwed up, sources told the WSJ.
Bondi downplayed the conflict in a statement to the Journal. “Our only priority is to continue working together with the FBI to make America safer by ensuring murderers and violent criminals face the most severe justice,” she said. Patel and the bureau have “worked tirelessly with my agencies and state partners,” she added.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also told the paper that Bondi, Patel, and other officials have been “working together to advance the Trump administration’s goals, mainly putting bad people behind bars.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House, DOJ, and FBI for comment.
Trump officials spent years stoking conspiracy theories around Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Investigators concluded the death was a suicide, but before joining the administration, current officials—including Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino—argued Epstein was murdered to protect his powerful clients.
On the campaign trail, Trump—who was close friends with Epstein for more than a decade—said he would release the Epstein files if he won.
After Trump took office, Bondi blindsided the White House in February by telling Fox News that a client list was on her desk awaiting her review. She also asked the FBI to assemble binders of Epstein materials without saying what the binders were for, then brought the binders to an event with right-wing influencers and handed them out.
When it turned out the material had already been made public, the influencers—and their MAGA followers—were livid.
In July, the DOJ and FBI issued a memo saying the evidence showed Epstein had in fact died by suicide and that no “client list” existed.
Bondi claimed that when she said she had the client list on her desk, what she really meant was that she had files related to Epstein. Patel tried to convince MAGA to drop the issue, insisting that the conspiracy theories he himself had peddled “just aren’t true, never have been.”
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House of Representatives is now pushing for the materials’ release. After this week’s special congressional election in Arizona, they have the numbers to override House Speaker Mike Johnson’s effort to block a vote on the matter.
In an interview with the Journal, Ty Cobb, who led the Trump White House’s response to a special counsel probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in 2017, said the Epstein scandal “may be the worst-managed PR event in history.”
“You’ve got multiple mouthpieces, and they’re all covering their own a– now,” he said.
White House spokesperson Steven Cheung responded by telling the Journal that Cobb had a “debilitating diagnosis of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
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