A day after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious Tuesday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, images that capture the contents of a folder of her prepared notes for the hearing is stirring discourse online.
Bondi’s handwritten words are clearly legible in close-up photos taken by Reuters photographer Jonathan Ernst, as is a screenshot of a 2024 social media post by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and a typed, bullet-pointed list of lines meant to be directed at Whitehouse.
“You rail against dark money, but work with dark money groups,” one of Bondi’s attack lines reads, followed by: “You are a total hypocrite.”
In a handwritten note, Bondi plans to ask Whitehouse if he ever took money from tech billionaire and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a one-time associate of the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
By Wednesday afternoon, Bondi’s notes had been widely circulated ― and dissected ― on social media.
While some noted that arriving to the hearing prepared “puts her above most of” the Trump administration “competency wise,” others were more critical.
“Telling isn’t it, that their notes aren’t filled with stats and facts to back up their positions, but name calling and personal attacks against the Dem senators,” one person wrote on Bluesky.
Another person on X wrote, “You only need notes if you aren’t testifying truthfully from memory.”
Though Bondi didn’t use any of her planned attacks, her appearance at Tuesday’s hearing was nothing short of combative. For hours, the attorney general reinstated her devotion to President Donald Trump by dodging questions from Democratic senators on the Epstein files and the president’s targeting of his political foes.
When asked by Whitehouse about Trump’s ties to Epstein, Bondi turned the tables and suggested he should be more concerned about his own tangential link to the financier, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking underage girls.
In an email to HuffPost Tuesday, Whitehouse denied Bondi’s claims.
“Contrary to what the Attorney General said multiple times today, nobody by the name of Reid (or Reed) Hoffman has donated to any of my campaigns – not in 2018, not in 2024, not ever,” he said in a statement. “Attorney General Bondi made up nonsense to avoid answering whether the White House Border Czar returned the $50k cash payment that the FBI gave him, and whether the FBI has photos from Epstein’s safe of Trump with young women, and whether FBI Director Patel lied to us.”
The statement continued, “The American people should expect that their Attorney General can answer simple questions and tell the truth and perform elementary fact-checking. That is not the case with Trump’s MAGA Department of Justice.”