WASHINGTON — FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino butted heads with Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this week over the Trump administration’s handling of its Jeffrey Epstein investigation — including a purported review of the late pedophile‘s so-called “client list” that officials now say never existed.
The heated exchange prompted Bongino to take a personal day Friday and he is considering resigning after fewer than four months in his job, a source familiar with the matter told The Post, adding that Bongino’s relationship with Bondi no longer appears salvageable.
“I don’t think Dan comes back if Pam stays,” this person said, even though both parties had publicly stated an internal review of the Epstein file yielded no smoking-gun information about his death, high-powered associates or sickening crimes.
Matters came to a head after the Department of Justice concluded a probe into the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Aug. 10, 2019, weeks after being charged with sex trafficking dozens of girls — some as young as 14 years old.
That investigation included a pile of documents that Bondi told Fox News in February were on her desk at the Justice Department “to be reviewed,” appearing to confirm those papers included the perv’s infamous “client list.”
“In February, I did an interview on Fox, and it’s been getting a lot of attention because I said — I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, ‘it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed,’ meaning the [Epstein] file along with the JFK and MLK files as well,” Bondi said during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, Duke of York, are just some of the powerful businessmen and politicians that had been photographed visiting with Epstein in the past.
Trump partied with the financier years before his first run for public office in the 1990s — but reportedly banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007 following an incident with a club member’s teenage daughter.
Earlier this year, the DOJ released some records from its investigation that showed flight logs and a contact list Epstein kept before his arrest in 2019, most of which had already been made public during the 2021 trial of his accomplice and now-convicted madam Ghislaine Maxwell.
Right-wing social media influencers were also welcomed to the White House and handed binders titled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1,” in an apparently show transparency by the administration, which was later widely mocked after no new details of the case were disclosed.
Trump said during the 2024 campaign he’d have “no problem” releasing all files related to Epstein if elected — including the “client list” — saying he was “not involved” and “never went to his island” of Little St. James, where the deceased sex trafficker allegedly abused his underage victims.
In addition to hinting months ago at a publication of the “client list,” Bondi had also suggested the FBI’s New York Field Office was “in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein.”
But her department released a two-page memo Monday stating that a “systematic review” of evidence concluded the 66-year-old died by suicide after impacting “over one thousand victims” and there had been “no incriminating ‘client list.’”
“There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions,” the memo noted.
“We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Asked Tuesday whether Epstein was possibly an intelligence asset — which some commentators had put forward as an explanation for the terms of a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal he secured in 2008 following earlier sex charges involving minors — Bondi said: “To him being an [intelligence] agent, I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you on that.”
Former Miami US Attorney Alex Acosta, the architect of that plea deal, was quoted as saying while being considered for a position in the first Trump administration: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”
Bondi also shot down speculation that a missing minute of the 10-hour surveillance footage DOJ released along with the memo to show no one else entered Epstein’s Manhattan lockup was due to the age of the equipment still in use by federal prisons.
“What we learned from the Bureau of Prisons was, every year, every night, they redo that video. It’s old, from like 1999, so every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing,” she said.
“So we’re looking for that video to release that as well, showing that a minute is missing every night.”
In June, Bongino had also told Fox News nothing in the Epstein file indicated he died of any cause other than suicide.
“The evidence we have in our files clearly indicates that it was, in fact, a suicide. We do have video,” the former Fox News host said. “It’s not the greatest video in the world.”
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