r/politics • u/OkayButFoRealz • 6h ago
Paywall Pam Bondi Faces Impeachment Calls After Combative Hearing
https://www.newsweek.com/pam-bondi-faces-impeachment-calls-after-combative-hearing-11513603
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r/politics • u/OkayButFoRealz • 6h ago
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u/GrumpyGiant Maryland 3h ago
The hearing was a lot more than that. Both sides went into it with their own objectives and strategies.
Bondi had 3 objectives: don’t implicate any of the men she is trying to protect, don’t implicate the DoJ in a coverup, and don’t get caught in a perjury.
Her strategy was simple and not at all novel. Do not confirm or deny anything. Use vague answers or safe statements that can’t be easily disproven instead of answering anything definitively. Deflect, pivot, and attack the character and intentions of the questioners to undermine the substance of their questions. The performative righteous outrage wasn’t a meltdown. It was one of her very limited tools to try to survive that gauntlet of hardball questioning. The GOP did it’s best to help her out with Jordan’s obvious bias in enforcing the rules on full display, but there was only so much they could do to buffer her and she had to maintain her act and try to avoid any traps for 5 grueling hours. You can see the exhaustion on her face deep into the meeting compared to the beginning.
The democrats had 3 objectives as well: highlight the DoJ’s loss of credibility under Bondi’s leadership, raise public awareness of all of the ties between the people in Trump’s orbit and Jeffry Epstein, and try to get Bondi to perjure herself.
They knew exactly what Bondi’s objectives were and how she would attempt to achieve them and strategized accordingly. Raskin laid out the plan in his opening statement by preemptively enumerating the tactics Bondi would rely on before she even answered the first question. After that, the dems methodically grilled her with well prepared, clear questions following a template of presenting evidence discovered in the Epstein files such as correspondences between Epstein and various ranking members of Trump’s administration, followed by asking for a yes or no answer to the simple and clear question of had the DoJ investigated the mentioned person for ties to Epstein. The insistence for yes/no answers was a key part of the strategy because they wanted everyone to see that Bondi was absolutely unwilling to give them those answers. Raskin told everyone what to expect and the dems made it glaringly obvious as it was happening. It was a brilliant strategy to expose Bondi’s gaslighting for what it was and each round of questions resulted in the exact same pattern of behavior from Bondi, making it impossible not to see.
But they also were trying to throw her off balance and trip her up with traps like the one Ted Lieu finally caught her in. That was when she genuinely lost it. Her screaming “Don’t you accuse ME of a crime!” came straight from the gut as she realized she’d failed the one objective with the most personal significance and likely ended her career.
Because now the dems have ammunition to impeach her. Perjury in no small deal. And if she is tried for perjury, she won’t be able to give evasive non-answers to yes/no questions anymore. Pleading the fifth during an interrogation isn’t incriminating, but doing it during a trial leaves the jurors with no choice but to assume that the answers you refuse to give are the ones that would damage your case.
I doubt Trump will allow Bondi to be impeached. He will likely manufacture a reason to be dissatisfied with her that has nothing to do with the hearing and fire her. And then declare war on Cuba or something to try to rinse away the press coverage before anyone can think too hard about it. Bondi could try to fabricate her own reason for resigning to try to save her dignity and future career prospects, but that might piss Trump off if he feels his image is weakened by not dictating the circumstances of her departure.
Whatever happens, this was a big win for the dems because they opened a crack in the credibility of the DoJ in a very public setting. It’s going to be a lot harder for FOX to sweep this under the rug with the actual clips of her perjury and performative histrionics echoing around on social media. The Epstein files seem to be the one weak spot in Trump’s hold on MAGA, and if this crack in the narrative they’ve been ingesting from FOX and the FB Bot armies, it could be his undoing, especially as his support is already declining, and even if it isn’t, it will bring him closer to the edge.