The actual letter sent yesterday by Ro Khanna and Nancy Mace to Chairman Comer explains that the DoJ refusal to have Bondi appear has no legal substance at all. It’s an easy read, so I included the text along with the source. See it for yourself.

Note especially the assertion made in paragraph 5, “As you know, Congress’s oversight authority does not end when an official leaves office. In fact, just last year the Committee issued subpoenas to six former Attorneys General, spanning multiple administrations of both political parties.”

Source

Congress of the United States Washington, DC 20515

April 7, 2026

The Honorable James Comer
Chairman
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Chairman Comer,

We urge you to make clear former Attorney General Pam Bondi remains obligated to comply with the Oversight Committee’s subpoena and appear for her scheduled deposition on April 14, 2026.

We moved to subpoena Pam Bondi, and the Committee voted to approve this motion on a bipartisan basis, because the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) still has not complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act (Public Law No: 119-38), and because serious questions remain regarding the DOJ’s non-compliance and their handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his associates while she was Attorney General.

The removal of Pam Bondi as Attorney General does not diminish the Committee’s legitimate oversight interests in seeking her sworn testimony or the need for accountability and information about files withheld from the public by the DOJ. On the contrary, it makes her sworn testimony even more important, especially with respect to actions she took as Attorney General, matters already under investigation, and decisions made under her leadership.

When Pam Bondi appeared last month for a briefing, you reiterated you would continue to pursue her sworn testimony and would discuss holding her in contempt of Congress if she failed to comply. She also stated that she would follow the law with respect to her subpoena, which clearly requires her to appear before the Oversight Committee.

As you know, Congress’s oversight authority does not end when an official leaves office. In fact, just last year the Committee issued subpoenas to six former Attorneys General, spanning multiple administrations of both political parties. The American people deserve answers about whether Congress was misled and whether information is being withheld by the DOJ.

We ask you to publicly reaffirm that Pam Bondi must appear on April 14 for a sworn deposition as ordered or face appropriate enforcement if she refuses to comply.

Sincerely,

Ro Khanna
Member of Congress
U.S. House of Representatives

Nancy Mace
Member of Congress
U.S. House of Representatives

Yeah. A friend of mine told me last year, just before the second term started, “Before this is over, everyone here not drinking the koolaid or rich enough to leave is gonna know what it feels like to be an abused spouse, trapped in a brutal marriage they can’t leave.”

At this point I’m not sure my buddy was wrong: isolating the US from all allies; ripping through our finances and savings; doing everything he can to make sure individuals feel powerless and alone; openly destroying/mocking us and/or whatever what we value, like the East Wing or the king airplane shitting video; pursuing the ICE murders, incarcerations, deportations and disappearances; making sure all internal sources of support (SNAP, SS, etc) for individuals are credibly threatened or gone . . . there’s a LOT of what he is doing now that could be tracked to an exact parallel in domestic violence situations.

Honestly, I’m all for it and wish the dems had been doing it even more.

Same here. And for the record, until now usually it has been Al Green introducing articles of impeachment alone, but doing it anyway because it’s the right fucking thing to do. I have nothing but the deepest respect for that, because it has NOT helped him politically, but he does it anyway, like the sign at the State of the Union address: where the fuck were his Democratic colleagues??? Even if it goes nowhere, I appreciate that there’s at least one Dem in DC not politely ignoring the total illegality and unconstitutionality of what the orange chancre does.

This time, though, it is John Larson of Connecticut introducing the articles of impeachment, a guy who’s been in Congress since 1999. I never heard of him, so I looked him up. And while this impeachment is still the right thing to do, Larson is 100% a party man, never steps out of line, and has never done this or anything like it before.

But in an unrelated note, Wikipedia says that, “For the first time since 1999, Larson faces serious Democratic challengers.” Better late than never, but I have to ask myself, would Larson even be bothering if his own ass weren’t on the line because progressives – not R’s, not D’s, but progressives – are overturning almost every single election they’re appearing in with shock wins, often with unexpected double-point leads?

I’ll take a Hail Mary pass, but it would go over a lot better with me if I didn’t think he was doing it solely to save his own seat.

What gives you the impression that Bondi is fractionally competent

She actually has experience, if not discernible skill, at heading a government legal agency: she was Florida AG 2011 - 2019. Before that she was a prosecutor with actual litigation experience who appears to have come up the ranks. She was also able to use her position to enrich herself and protect Trump, which may seem easy on the face of it, in Florida especially, but there are still various obstacles like competent judges, opposing attorneys, and state laws to navigate, which she did. She also argued against the appointments of both Habba and Halligan, which suggests she understood what a train wreck that was going to be, but was overruled by Trump.

and what gives you confidence that her replacement will be less competent?

That is a LOW fucking bar, lol. It’s like asking if a cockroach can excel at limbo. So regardless of who is ultimately chosen, “Yes.”

Are you suggesting otherwise? I don’t share your faith that Bondi was too incompetent to be easily bested in incompetence by any replacement chosen. As I said above,

When all a “leader” values is loyalty and everything else is a distant third – like prosecutorial expertise in a HIGHLY technical field such as criminal law – they should expect their opposition to rejoice when they’ve fired someone even fractionally competent, because it’s a complete own-goal that will pay off royally for anyone in opposition to the administration.

I said that because almost all of Trump’s legal picks share a specific characteristic, and it’s not smarts. And there’s another thing to consider: this appointment may be different because he picks men when he “wants something done” and women when he wants a meat shield, but specifically when it comes to picking disposable attorneys, Trump evaluates legal talent with his eyes.

You think replacing Bondi with Blanche is “progress”?

I do. Todd Blanche is nothing, just a jumped up criminal defense lawyer. You seem to be unaware that people of conscience walking out of Trump’s administration on the justice side has already resulted in major losses for the administration, because he replaces them with talentless hacks whose sole qualification is loyalty to himself.

Two state AGs, Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan, have been forced out of their illegally held positions as a result.

And at least two revenge prosecution cases near and dear to the orange pustule, those of James Comey and Letitia James, were also thrown out because of the sheer incompetence of the lackeys appointed to the positions vacated by people of conscience. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying, except they’re so incredibly shitty at what they do now they can’t even get grand juries to indict.

I’m not even counting how almost all the career prosecutors walking out of the Minnesota AG office completely crippled the DoJ’s goal of investigating and charging Renee Good’s wife, as well as stopped in its tracks any hope of making that state a showpiece of legal retribution against its many activists and protesters, which is what investigating and (they hoped) charging Good’s wife would have kicked off for them.

All gone, simply because the people with experience and a working conscience left and took their combined experience and institutional knowledge with them.

All of this, including Bondi’s firing, is yet another stake in the heart of this administration’s revenge prosecution program. And wherever it happens, high or low, it’s a BIG step forward in making sure the fascists are crippled from using the courts as tools of control and retribution against the rest of us.

TL;DR: When all a “leader” values is loyalty and everything else is a distant third – like prosecutorial expertise in a HIGHLY technical field such as criminal law – they should expect their opposition to rejoice when they’ve fired someone even fractionally competent, because it’s a complete own-goal that will pay off royally for anyone in opposition to the administration.

Our blessed lord and slaver.

When he at some point dies, i am sure that some people will be waiting for him on the third day to come back

Well, at least the ground will be soft from all the tributes. He’ll have a choice to make: rest in piss or scrabble back up through it, undead motherfucker.

I’m actually hoping for the undead scenario, because of all his kids that will be so enraged about having to wait for the estate cash that they’ll just try to kill him again and again – but before they can, they have to fight off that wife of his wanting to slurp up the undead soul out of his rotting carcass first.

That is absolutely a movie I’d watch. Or, the president can make my dreams come true, lol

Yes. It’s a feature, not a bug, and the propaganda is made to do this by design: if you can keep someone in cognitive dissonance, you can feed them whatever cognitive slop you want, and then they have to find a way to explain it to themselves and keep believing, or face the consequences of realizing the whole thing is a lie, which are usually too high to bear. And it just piles on.

This is part of why the Trump Republicans hate James Talarico so much: he is showing the MAGA crowd you can (and should) be able to keep your Christianity and still ditch Trump, the two are not connected in any actual way except by propaganda. I think urban folks don’t realize just how hard this conflation of MAGA and Christianity has been pumped in rural regions: to leave Trump is to face hellfire. To many of us that sounds ridiculous, and it is, but I’m not joking: they’ve made it so that to be Christian is to be MAGA, and to ditch Trump is to desert Christianity itself.

Strangely enough, the cognitive dissonance is also the weakest point in the whole scheme, and is why the trip out of cognitive manipulation often starts with the tiniest, often unnoticeable piece that doesn’t fit: it sticks in their head and refuses to be argued away, and then something else happens, and something else. Cult deprogramming is all about this, allowing people physical space and time to find their own way out of the mental hole without ever actually forcing them to do so.

It’s why getting rid of the news as infotainment is so critically important if we can ever get out of this mess: that’s the source of the propaganda that keeps it going for the hardcore MAGA believers no matter what their orange god does.

Most of us on this thread don’t, I’d wager to guess.

There is also a non-zero chance that he is just pissed off enough at his wife, who has been cucking him publicly with Lewandowski since the first Trump administration, to have gotten himself “caught” kinda sorta not by accident.

In the pic I saw he’s looking directly at the camera, which would tend to indicate that he knew he was being photographed.

It’s no guarantee he knew where that pic might end up, but on the other hand, in this digital age we ALL know that once a pic is taken, getting it out of every last repository is like trying to pull pee back out of a swimming pool.

Maybe right now he’s happier than he’s been in ages. I hope so, anyway.

TL;DR: I celebrate this guy’s harmless kink, everyone should have one. And honestly, if he employed it to also fuck over his wholly unnatural plastic-filled, two-timing, puppy-killing, immigrant-persecuting, MAGA-loving, murderously fascist virago of a wife that he believed was actually human when he married it, then I celebrate his harmless kink even MORE.

Talk about a whitelist . . .

So many of the comments are absolute gold. They’re the best thing about the article!

I could have quoted a dozen more, but they’re behind the paywall even when direct linked and are not gathered with the article content in archive versions. I just wish I could have screenshotted at least the top ten, but they do it in this weird side frame that doesn’t move with the rest of the page so it was a lost cause.

I don’t believe in giving that asshole a pass on ANYTHING, and I would suggest the same strategy to you, especially since what they believe he passed along was related to current US troop safety in the region.

I don’t believe in the war, but I also don’t believe in cannon fodder. It’s not Barron who’s going to bleed for this.

I say hold that piece of shit responsible for ALL of it.

This is actually a bigger deal than just a “No shit, Sherlock,” only not in the direction of exposing what Trump did. We ALL fucking know he hoovered up whatever he thought he could sell on the international elite markets. That’s no surprise; that’s not even news.

But for those of us who waited all last year for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report to be released publicly, only to see it suppressed by Trump’s favorite judge in Florida, Aileen Cannon, this is a big deal. It’s sort of an Epstein Files, Part Duh.

Special Counsel Jack Smith is the guy who, along with a number of career (read: not partisan aligned) prosecutors, assembled two cases against Trump: the 2020 election interference, and the documents handling. The documents case is the one Aileen Cannon delayed until she could throw it out, and then when the report was due to be released, as they almost all are, she ordered that suppressed as well, along with all the evidence assembled backing it.

This gag order imposed on Jack Smith, specifically, is so unusually extreme and all-encompassing that Smith was legally barred from testifying to Congress on his own report’s specific contents when subpoenaed to appear in a deposition by the House Judiciary Committee.

But with the same nimble political dexterity they have handled the Epstein files, Trump and his butt sniffers on the House Judiciary Committee have been trying like hell to smear Jack Smith: the report is apparently so incendiary they all live in fear of it coming out, so they have been working overtime to get ahead of the inevitable leak or release by using it to disparage Jack Smith and by extension his evidence.

In pursuit of this goal of somehow maligning Jack Smith, the House Judiciary Committee has been using that report like a menu to request materials about the original case from the DoJ. And they’ve been getting them – including materials that either include or make detailed mention of the specific information that Judge Cannon specifically embargoed in her order suppressing Smith’s report and any discussion of it, including Smith’s Congressional testimony:

This particular production contained a memorandum detailing non-public information about the classified documents Trump stole when leaving office. The newly produced materials offer a startling view of evidence gathered by Special Counsel Jack Smith during his investigations into the criminal activity of President Trump, even as DOJ continues to suppress Volume II of his final report.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking (non-butt-sniffing) member of the House Judiciary Committee, saw this for what it is and fired off a letter to Pam Bondi, detailing what was obviously being hidden and demanding answers, specifically, “on who accessed the materials, what they contained, and whether any foreign actors were able to access or exploit the information. He also called for the release of all remaining investigative files, including the full, unredacted Special Counsel report.”

This is also directly relevant to the war in Iran:

“If this map is related to our military posture in the Middle East, and it was in fact shown to any foreign official, Saudi or otherwise, that would amount to an unforgiveable betrayal of our men and women in uniform who are currently valiantly fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran,” wrote Ranking Member Raskin.

This is the upshot (emphasis mine):

DOJ’s hypocrisy in gagging Jack Smith is underscored by this latest disclosure. Special Counsel Smith remains barred from sharing information with Congress under a sweeping gag order imposed by Justice Cannon, at the request of Donald Trump, and enforced by DOJ. At the same time, DOJ has produced cherry-picked documents to aid Chairman Jordan’s vindictive campaign against Special Counsel Smith and his team, including some documents that appear to violate Judge Cannon’s order. DOJ appears to view the judicial order as rules for thee—Jack Smith—but not for me. However, it appears that the evidence against Donald Trump collected by Jack Smith and memorialized in his records is so damning, that even DOJ’s carefully curated production cannot fully excise findings that the President sold out national security to advance his own business interests.

👍 🤣

Thank you for this response. It is exactly what I was interested in understanding. I’m not interested in journalist shaming through critical op-eds, and I did not see this article in that light. I saw it as NYT shaming, and I’m not alone because the comments on the NYT piece I linked are filled with the exact same ideas.

Also, you should know that it has been pointed out to me that this Common Dreams article I posted is actually from last October: I saw it on a sidebar for Saturday’s march, but it was so au courant to the latest tepid NYT coverage that I mistakenly assumed that that was the NYT article it was talking about, and even linked it. (I have edited the post body to correct my error.)

No, it’s that over multiple No Kings turnouts the NYT has never changed its game: the criticisms it makes in October are just as applicable to NYT coverage of No Kings today. That’s why I didn’t spot it. And NYT does it across the board, editorializing headlines and minimizing counts, to the point I just switch to international reporting to get the real story on No Kings, ICE, and anything that looks like real resistance.

I also did not downvote either of your comments: I asked a question, you answered it, fair enough. But this is the one I was looking for.

Holy shit, you’re right. I saw it in a sidebar of an article about yesterday’s No Kings and assumed it was also current, because I’d just come off that NYT article I linked above.

Funny thing is the new NYT article has exactly the same fault as the older one, so I guess it’s current anyway?

But I didn’t spot it. Massive error on my part. Thank you for the correction.

I would be very interested in knowing more, and just so you know I’m not looking for an argument. Genuinely curious.

Plus, I can’t be personally offended because this is the first time I’ve ever posted anything from there. The article caught my attention because it was a further exploration of all the comments skewering the NYT author for writing such a limp piece of “look away, nothing to see here” propaganda, so I thought I’d post.

If you don’t want to say it publicly, hit my DMs. But I am genuinely interested.

Yep. I got distracted when I was posting, but I have edited the original post to include links to the original NYT article, not least because almost every single comment calls out the NYT coverage as a whole, as well as this article in particular, for being, as one commenter put it, “dyspeptic.”

I have wondered at the failure until now of the NYTs to write anything about the over 3000 planned protests for No Kings 3. What I feel now is dismay. What a dyspeptic article!

Like this one from New Jersey:

The author seems to think that millions of people marching to protest an authoritarian regime and supporting the Constitution is not a strong enough message. Five MAGA supporters in a diner somehow speak for America, but 10 million protesting in support of America is troublesome for democrats? Make that make sense.

And this one from California:

I believe the only thing missing from the No Kings rallies is the urgency of the press. The main stream media provided days, even weeks of coverage of the Charlie Kirk murder and the same for the kidnapping of Savanna Guthrie’s mother. But like all the rallies before it, I expect nothing more than a blurb on tonight’s weekend news with a few shots of massive crowds in a handful of big cities. Then, silence. There will be no follow up questions with members of Congress in the coming weeks, no answers demanded from the President about whether or not they support or fear the messages the American people are rallying around. The Vietnam anti-war protests were nightly news. Today’s protests will be lucky if they get 2 minutes in the local news.

And this one from Massachusetts:

Instead of questioning the value of these protests, how about reporting on the incredible number of protests planned, not just in the U.S., but internationally? How about reporting on the wide range of people attending, and the wonderful fact of peaceful behavior despite huge crowds and strong emotions? How about reporting on the fact that despite every effort by Trump et al to dismantle the rights baked into our country’s founding and added onto since then, people are out there standing up, speaking up, resisting and fighting for the removal of this madman and his toadies? How about reporting on the resilience of people and our belief in the power of collective protest???

And this one from somewhere in the US?

Very disappointed in the skeptical tone of this article.

When people criticize the Times for being out of touch, this is part of the reason why.

Millions and millions of Americans come out for some of the largest protests in our history.

Talk to Ruth Ben Ghiat about this. Resistance movements take time to build.

Don’t try to disparage the event before it has even happened.

In the rare moment I mock a person directly, I usually just do it to their faces; it literally never occurred to me to do the near-miss. Good plan – and I agree, traitors don’t deserve respect.