Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson warned this week that Attorney General Pam Bondi could potentially face criminal charges for her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, raising the troubling possibility that a Trump administration official might someday, somehow, theoretically be held accountable for something.
Wilson suggested that Bondi could face obstruction of justice charges if it's proven that Justice Department officials deliberately withheld or destroyed Epstein records to protect Trump or other allies, particularly given that released emails show Epstein saying Trump knew about the girls and spent hours with victim Virginia Giuffre.
The warning comes after Bondi claimed in February that Epstein's client list was sitting on her desk to review, only for the Justice Department to later release a memo saying no such list existed—a completely normal series of events that suggests either breathtaking incompetence or a deliberate cover-up, though Republicans insist there's definitely a third explanation they just haven't thought of yet.
GOP Representative Warren Davidson told CNN he wanted Bondi to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to do some explaining, marking the first time in recorded history that a Republican lawmaker has expressed interest in congressional oversight of a Republican administration.
Wilson stressed that no court has found Bondi criminally liable, but argued that the current Justice Department is unlikely to investigate its own leadership, noting the unfortunate reality that the people in charge of determining whether crimes occurred are the same people who may have committed those crimes—a system that has somehow never been problematic before.
Legal experts say that for Bondi to actually face charges, prosecutors would need to find evidence of deliberate wrongdoing, convince a grand jury to indict, and overcome the fact that high-ranking government officials are essentially immune from consequences—hurdles so insurmountable that Wilson's warning is less a prediction and more a thought experiment about what justice might look like in an alternate universe where it exists.
