House Speaker Mike Johnson offered up an extremely rare rebuke of the Trump administration over its tracking of lawmakers’ searches of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The revelation that the Justice Department was monitoring which unredacted files lawmakers were looking up was inadvertently made by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
During her combative appearance before House members on Tuesday, a list of one lawmaker’s search history was spotted in Bondi’s binder of prepared information.
The printout showed which documents Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal had pulled up during her visit to see the Justice Department’s unredacted files under the title “Jayapal Pramila Search History.”
The revelation sparked furious backlash among Democrats, but even Johnson, who is almost always a fierce defender of the administration, admonished it.
“I think members should obviously have the right to peruse those at their own speed and with their own discretion. I don’t think it’s appropriate for anybody to be tracking that,” Johnson, 54, said Thursday.
He told CNN’s Manu Raju that he would “echo that to anybody involved with the DOJ.”
Johnson’s rebuke came one day after he declined to comment on the spying allegation, claiming he didn’t know anything about it.
Jayapal slammed the Justice Department keeping tabs on her search history on Wednesday afternoon on X where she shared a photo showing Bondi’s printed list with her name from the explosive hearing.
“It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files,” Jayapal, 60, wrote on X.
She went on to accuse the attorney general of showing up with a “burn book” that had the exact emails she had searched from the files.
“That is outrageous and I intend to pursue this and stop this spying on members,” the Washington lawmaker added.
Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, 48, also accused the Justice Department of tracking searches and that there were timestamps with it.
“Yes. I will confirm. DOJ is tracking the Epstein documents Members of Congress search for, open, and review,” she wrote on X. “I was able to navigate the system today and I won’t disclose how or the nature of how; but confirmed the DOJ is TAGGING ALL DOCUMENTS Members of Congress search, open and review.”
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, who got in a heated showdown with Bondi on Wednesday during which she called him a “washed-up loser lawyer,” accused the department of spying on Democrats.
Raskin, 63, said DOJ required members of Congress “who wish to review the slightly-less-redacted Epstein files to travel to a DOJ annex, sit at one of four DOJ-owned computers, use a clunky and convoluted software system provided by DOJ, and search for and read documents while DOJ staffers look over our shoulders.”
“It is the perfect set up for DOJ to spy on Members’ review, monitoring, recording, and logging every document we choose to pull up,” Raskin added.
The top Democratic lawmaker argued the photos of Bondi’s “burn book” confirmed his suspicions and that DOJ was spying “in yet another blatant attempt to intrude into Congress’s oversight processes.”
He called it an outrage and demanded they immediately stop tracking lawmakers’ searches.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, the Justice Department acknowledged that it logs all searches, but it did not address the criticism or explain why Bondi had Jayapal’s list with her.
“DOJ has extended Congress the opportunity to review unredacted documents in the Epstein files,” a DOJ spokesperson said. “As a part of that review, DOJ logs all searches made on its systems to protect against the release of victim information.”
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