Senate Democrats say they will hold Attorney General Pam Bondi “accountable” for her leadership of the Department of Justice and for what they view as her contemptuous attitude toward them, which they say was evident during a combative Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week.
Democratic senators acknowledge they don’t have much leverage over the Trump Justice Department now, but they’re laying the groundwork for a war with the administration if they flip the Senate or House in the 2026 midterm election.
“I was literally just talking to some of my Democratic House colleagues on Judiciary about the unprecedented nature of that kind of slandering obstruction of oversight,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Bondi’s personal attacks on Democratic senators during Tuesday’s hearing.
Schiff, a first-term senator, said his Senate colleagues told him that Bondi’s political attacks on senators during an oversight hearing “was really unprecedented.”
He said Democrats would try their best to push back on Bondi’s refusal to answer their questions in the coming days and weeks, but he acknowledged they would need help from Republicans to get anywhere.
This has Democrats looking ahead to the battles to come with the administration if they can win back either chamber in 2026, something they are feeling more optimistic about doing.
“We have to hope that we can flip one or both houses and then we’ll do some serious oversight. The administration ought to recognize they’re only going to defer accountability for so long,” Schiff said.
For Schiff, the battle is personal to some extent because President Trump has publicly called on Bondi to prosecute the California senator, who served as a House prosecutor during Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020.
Schiff on Wednesday stopped short of discussing whether Democrats would explore impeachment proceedings against Bondi, saying “we should be focused on practical remedies that we can use right now.”
“I do think the damage she’s doing to the department will take decades to recover from,” he said.
The Hill reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.
Democrats are accusing Bondi of weaponizing the department by investigating and prosecuting Trump’s enemies — notably former FBI Director James Comey and former national security adviser John Bolton — and shielding the president’s allies from prosecution, such as border czar Tom Homan, who was recorded accepting $50,000 in cash in a paper bag from undercover FBI agents.
Bondi came to Tuesday’s hearing ready for a brawl, with personal attacks prepared for individual senators.
She accused Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, of hating Trump more than loving Chicago, after Durbin questioned the legal justification for deploying Texas National Guard members to the city.
She then went on to spar with other Democrats, falsely accusing Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) of accepting campaign contributions from a close associate of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and bashing Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) for “lying” about having served as a Marine in Vietnam.
She accused Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) of attending an antifa rally — something Hirono denied — and needled Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) for having “stormed” a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in California earlier this year.
Sen. Chris Coons (Del.), a pragmatic Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who has a strong track record of working with Republicans, called Bondi’s personal shots at Democratic senators “breathtaking.”
“It was like a Fox News interview or a UFC fight. She came with personalized insults for every member and was exceptionally sharp and aggressive, mostly refusing to answer any substantive question,” he said.
She ripped Blumenthal for “lying” about his military record when he asked her whether she had conversations with members of her former lobbying firm when it was working to get the Justice Department to drop a lawsuit against one of its clients, American Express Global Business Travel.
Some Republican senators were taken aback by Bondi’s full-throated attacks on Democratic colleagues and are warning the attorney general and the administration to tone down rhetoric and theatrics that could come back to bite Republicans when there’s a Democrat in the White House.
“We may have a new standard for oversight hearings,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said of the level of vitriol in the room during Bondi’s testimony. “I think we have to be careful.
He said he could understand Bondi’s temptation to respond aggressively when attacked or criticized by Senate Democrats, but he observed her personalized shots at Democrats on the panel seemed “prepared” in advance.
“I would just warn the administration, ‘Be careful,’” he said. “You don’t open up like that. And if you do, then just expect that to become the new normal when a Democrat is holding the gavel.”
A second Republican senator who requested anonymity said Bondi’s aggressive attacks on senators could backfire on Republicans down the road.
“It’s probably not a good precedent to set,” the lawmaker warned.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), a senior Republican on the Judiciary panel, however, said Bondi was entitled to throw punches given partisan actions by Democrats to prosecute Trump after he left office in 2021.
“It’s just the new normal. The level of attacks coming from these folks, the Democrats, who weaponized the law against Trump. Most of us are tired of dealing with it,” he said.
Durbin warned Bondi at Tuesday’s hearing that she would be held to account for her “conduct” after she refused to answer his question about who gave the order for FBI agents to “flag” mentions of Trump’s name in the Justice Department’s Epstein files.
“Eventually you’re going to have to answer for your conduct in this. You won’t do it today but eventually you will,” Durbin told her bluntly.
Durbin accused Bondi of “systematically” weaponizing the Justice Department “to protect President Trump and his allies and attack his opponents.”
He cited the purge of “hundreds of career officials” under Bondi’s leadership and the disbanding of the FBI’s foreign influence task force “despite the growing threat of foreign election interference.”
He criticized her for “effectively” shutting down the department’s office of professional responsibility and not recusing herself from signing off on Trump’s acceptance of a jet from the Qatari royal family despite having been a registered foreign agent for Qatar in the past.
Whitehouse, a senior member of the committee, said Bondi’s claim that he accepted contributions from Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor and acquaintance of Epstein, was “false.” He noted that the Justice Department under Bondi is prosecuting Comey for making a false statement to Congress.
Comey on Wednesday pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied to Congress. Career prosecutors at the Eastern District of Virginia initially judged the case against him as too weak to proceed.
Whitehouse said Democrats are prepared to bring the fight to Bondi’s doorstep by using an array of tactics to exert leverage on the administration.
“It’s the usual weaponry that we have, animated by persistence,” he said. “She’ll get questions for the record and we’ll see whether we get honest answers to the QFRs. And we can use [the Freedom of Information Act] because the Trump administration often gives Congress less information than it’s obliged to give to the general public through the Freedom of Information Act.”
