California Gov. Gavin Newsom took aim at Attorney General Pam Bondi with a brutal edit of President Donald Trump admiring construction work for his $400 million-dollar White House ballroom.
The MAGA leader interrupted the start of a televised sit-down with almost two dozen global oil executives on Friday to get up and wander over to the window, where he then gazed excitedly at the site where his East Wing ballroom is currently under construction. “Wow, what a view,” he said.
Newsom’s team was quick to seize upon the clip, posting an edit Sunday that featured not the construction site on the other side of the glass, but notorious footage of a younger Trump partying at his Mar-a-Lago resort with late financier, pedophile and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in 1992.
“PAM BONDI, RELEASE THE FILES!” the caption read.
Epstein died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, with authorities saying he’d hanged himself in his cell. His co-conspirator, former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, is currently serving a 20-year sentence.
Trump, a known associate of both Epstein and Maxwell, has long courted conspiracy theories popular among the MAGA base about an international pedophilic cabal, and he amplified claims in 2019 that Epstein’s death had been orchestrated by his political foes.
But the MAGA leader’s promises of full transparency on the Epstein-Maxwell case backfired spectacularly after the Justice Department and FBI determined last year that the late financier’s death in police custody was a suicide, and that he kept no “client list” of uber-wealthy co-conspirators. Bondi had previously claimed the roster was “sitting on my desk” awaiting review.
Public backlash proved swift and fierce, accompanied by renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein amid reports the MAGA president’s name features prominently in the case files. Trump resisted calls to release the files until bipartisan legislation passed in November mandating their release by Dec. 19, subject to redactions only for the sake of protecting victim’s identities.
As of January, the Justice Department has released only 1 percent of the total documents on the Epstein case.
Since the December deadline passed, Trump ordered strikes in Nigeria, captured Venezuela’s leader in a surprise raid, ramped up deportation efforts, defended the fatal shooting of a woman by an ICE agent, pushed to investigate the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and threatened military action against Iran along with a slate of allies from Colombia and Panama to Mexico and Greenland.
Critics have accused the administration of actively “flooding the zone,” a strategy of generating as much high-profile news as possible so as to deflect attention from scandals on which it’s become too difficult to put a positive spin.
Bondi, meanwhile, has proven conspicuously absent from public view.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on this story.
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