Attorney General Pam Bondi has been accused of using the arrest of former CNN host Don Lemon to distract from the Trump administration’s ongoing cover up of the Epstein files.
Lemon was arrested by federal authorities on Thursday night in connection with a church protest that had enraged Trump officials earlier this month as tensions flared over ICE operations in Minneapolis.
“At my direction, early this morning federal agents arrested Don Lemon, Trahern Jeen Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lydell Lundy, in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. More details soon,” Bondi wrote on X on Friday morning.
The push to charge Lemon for breaking the law, when he claims he was simply reporting as a journalist, comes as the DOJ continues to breach the Epstein Transparency Act that Trump reluctantly signed into law last year.
Under the act, the department was meant to release all files related to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein by December 19.
Forty-two days later, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Friday that only three million out of the six million documents the department collected relating to Epstein’s crimes and networks would be released.
“Time and again, the Trump Administration pursues its own political enemies over real justice,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, the lead Democrat on the House Oversight committee, which has released thousands of documents relating to the crimes of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an attack on free press, and EVERY American must push back on this dangerous, horrific, and authoritarian act. Don must be freed immediately.”
Garcia’s sentiment was shared by many on social media.
Lemon said he was simply doing his job as a reporter when he entered the Cities Church on January 18 to observe a demonstration against the area’s immigration crackdown.
Protesters had interrupted a service at the church, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official serves as a pastor, and chanted “ICE out.” Afterward, the Trump administration sought to charge eight people over the incident, including Mr. Lemon, but the magistrate judge who reviewed the evidence rejected the case against him as insufficient.
The Justice Department tried to appeal the case and sought additional warrants to arrest Lemon, only to be denied again last week.
MAGA erupted with glee after the Justice Department finally arrested Lemon while he was covering the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night.
“When life gives you lemons…” the White House gloated in a post on Friday, alongside a photo of the former anchor and Trump critic.
But others lashed out at Bondi for trying to distract from her own department’s ongoing recalcitrance over Epstein and his associates.
“So Don Lemon got arrested before anyone in the Epstein files. Got it,” said DJ-producer Edwin Konsept.
“I guess if we can’t get the scum on the Epstein list, Don Lemon will do, right MAGA?” one observer wrote in response to former Trump lawyer Jenna Elis, who gloated on X that the arrest was “poetic justice”.
Another X user wrote: They’ve had a year with the Epstein file with no arrests. 12 days after Lemon interviews people in a church that was being protested, already heard and denied by TWO judges, and still he’s in jail. Amazing.”
The Epstein files have been an ongoing headache for President Donald Trump, who is named repeatedly in the documents released so far.
For instance, bombshell emails reveal Trump “spent hours” at Jeffrey Epstein’s house with one of his victims, and “knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”—a reference to Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who recruited victims as part of his sex trafficking operation.
One of the documents also showed an FBI tip that accused him of holding a party for prostitutes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in connection with Epstein and Maxwell, while others revealed that he flew on Epstein’s private jet more frequently than had been previously reported.
Bondi has also come under fire over her botched handling of the files, after claiming in February last year that the files were sitting on her desk, only to not release them.
Tensions also escalated earlier this year when the attorney general last year organised a supposed “scoop” for MAGA social media influencers, who were called to the White House and presented with binders of Epstein-related documents.
But as it turned out, those binders contained hundreds of pages that had mostly been public for years.
Four months later, in a bid to kill the issue, Bondi’s Justice Department put out a memo saying there was no client list and that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”
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