Everyone expected that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week would be confrontational. What few outlets pointed out is just how shallow and politically-charged it turned out to be.
Anyone paying the slightest attention to televised congressional grillings knows they rarely have to do with substantive congressional oversight of the executive branch (which takes place primarily via records requests and closed-door sessions).
The real purpose of publicly dragging administration officials in front of committees is to generate partisan, political, and fundraising soundbites; something that is painfully obvious to anyone who personally attends any such hearings.
When hearings are televised, networks mostly alternate between close-ups of whoever is testifying and whichever senator or congressman is speaking. Zooming out would reveal a roomful of empty seats, insofar as hearings such as this one rarely attract significant in-person attendance.
Typically, a senator will walk in perfectly calm, sit down, work himself into a righteous fury for a few minutes of heated back-and-forth, then exit as soon as the cameras stop rolling. Hill staffers will then swing into action, clipping the best mic-drop moments from their senator’s questioning, pushing them out in social media posts, press releases, and fundraising emails. An especially epic “own” might find its way into party-level fundraising materials; the more you raise, the more you rise.
According to the unwritten, bipartisan rules of the game, when someone asks the witness a bad-faith question, providing a substantive answer is a waste of time. During the Bondi hearing, for example, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) wrapped things up by listing all the questions Bondi supposedly refused to answer. This Schiff charade included inquiries about the Jeffrey Epstein files, Bondi’s handling of high-profile merger cases, and the legal justification for deploying troops to U.S. cities.
Questions thus posed reflect little substance; rather, their effective meaning is more akin to chewing out one’s house pet for tearing up a homework assignment – “Bad dog! Bad!” Details don’t really matter, which is why Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) could make an elementary mistake like grilling Bondi over a merger approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, not the Justice Department, which Bondi oversees.
Such questions aren’t sincere attempts at dialogue. They are kabuki performances for an absent audience; best answered as per the Scriptures – “answer a fool according to his folly.” Attorney General Bondi did exactly that.
When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pressed her about Epstein, she pointed out that he had taken money from liberal billionaire and Epstein confidant Reid Hoffman. She also noted that Democrats seemed to forget about Epstein for the entirety of the Biden administration. Bondi then twisted the knife, asking, “Did you ask Merrick Garland any of this over the last four years when he sat before you?”
Exchanges about antitrust played out similarly. “On January 30th of this year, the Trump DOJ sued to block the merger of two tech companies,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) bloviated, referring to Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper. “Then a well-connected lobbyist met with your [Bondi’s] political deputies who overruled the career staff and approved the merger, so there was a settlement on that.”
This actually was not quite accurate. The Justice Department did not approve the merger because a lobbyist intervened, but because the case had questionable legal merit at best. Significantly, it was the Intelligence Community that advised department higher-ups that blocking the merger would have national security implications, allowing China’s Huawei to run roughshod over the marketplace.
Bondi, of course, could have explained all that, but it would have been a waste of time. Instead, she blasted Hirono for protesting alongside Antifa members.
Bondi displayed little patience for questions about sending the military to Chicago. When Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) demanded to know the legal rationale behind the deployment, she shot back, “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump.”
This hardly is the ideal way to conduct political discourse, but it is how the game has come to be played. Waltzing naively into a committee hearing like Joe Pesci, expecting to become a “made” mafioso, will only get you a political bullet to the back of the head. The sooner more Republicans learn this lesson from Bondi, the better.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served previously as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia, serves as head of Liberty Guard, and is the immediate past president of the National Rifle Association of America.