WASHINGTON — Former Attorney General Pam Bondi walked into the Rayburn House Office Building on Friday morning under the weight of months of accumulated institutional fury, arriving for a closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee that she had previously defied, delayed, and all but dared Congress to compel. The session, long anticipated by Epstein files investigators and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse alike, represented a convergence of three escalating storylines that have transformed the documents of a dead sex offender into one of Washington’s most persistent and politically combustible dramas.
On the same day Bondi appeared at the Capitol, President Donald Trump refiled a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal’s publisher over reporting that linked him to a lewd birthday letter addressed to Epstein. Separately, Columbia University continued to grapple with the fallout from Epstein files revelations showing the disgraced financier had orchestrated a backdoor admissions scheme to enroll his girlfriend into its prestigious dental school. The three episodes, unfolding in a single news cycle, illustrated how the Epstein files have continued to pull at threads across American institutions — the judiciary, the press, and elite academia — long after Epstein’s death in a New York federal jail in 2019.
Bondi’s appearance before the committee had been anything but certain. She was initially subpoenaed in August 2025 to provide unredacted documents; that subpoena went unanswered. A second subpoena issued in March 2026 required her to appear for a deposition on April 14. When Trump removed her as attorney general on April 2, the Justice Department declared the subpoena void because it had been issued in her official capacity. Democrats on the Oversight Committee promptly filed a civil contempt resolution. Republicans, within the hour, announced that Bondi had agreed to appear on May 29. The partisan theater, critics noted, had done little to illuminate anything.
In her prepared opening statement, according to a copy reviewed by several outlets, Bondi told committee members that the Justice Department had released all documents required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a law Congress passed and Trump signed in November 2025 after the administration missed its own self-imposed deadlines for disclosure. She acknowledged that she did not personally oversee every aspect of the release process. That admission drew immediate skepticism from Democrats on the panel, who have spent months documenting what they describe as a systematic effort to withhold documents implicating Trump and other powerful figures.
The Epstein files, as they have come to be known, comprise more than three million pages released by the Justice Department in January 2026 — a figure that sounds comprehensive until one examines what was left out. As the AP reported, subsequent releases and investigative cross-referencing revealed that documents containing direct accusations against Trump had been withheld from the first tranche. FBI agents reviewing the materials were reportedly instructed to flag mentions of Trump’s name; Bondi, in February 2026 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, refused to say who gave that order. Documents released later confirmed the flagging had occurred.
The committee conducting Friday’s deposition has cast a wide net over the Epstein investigation, taking transcribed testimony from Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator who is serving 20 years in federal prison, as well as from the late financier’s former lawyers, accountants, and — in a session that generated its own headlines — former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified in early May about a 2012 lunch he attended on Epstein’s private island, describing it as a family vacation stop of no consequence. The committee’s transcript of Lutnick’s deposition was released within days; Bondi’s is expected to be handled similarly.
“She has extensive personal knowledge about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said before the session. “The survivors deserve answers.” At least one survivor, a former ballet dancer who says Epstein abused her as a teenager, appeared outside the Capitol to call for the session to be filmed and released publicly rather than transcribed. Committee Chairman James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, had not committed to recording the deposition.
Meanwhile, across the legal landscape, Trump’s lawyers filed a revised $10 billion defamation complaint against Dow Jones & Company, the Wall Street Journal’s parent, and two of the newspaper’s reporters. The original lawsuit, filed in July 2025, had been dismissed in April by U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles, who ruled that Trump had failed to plausibly allege that the Journal had acted with actual malice — the elevated legal standard that public figures must clear in defamation cases. Judge Gayles gave Trump’s legal team until May 27 to refile, and they did so on deadline.
The story at the center of the dispute, published by the Journal in July 2025, described a birthday book assembled by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 to mark Epstein’s 50th birthday. One entry in the book, the Journal reported, bore Trump’s signature alongside an outline drawing of a naked woman and a message consistent with his style. Trump has denied writing or signing the letter. His refiled complaint, as CNN reported, alleged that the Journal’s coverage reflected “glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting” and that reporters falsely presented as fact that Trump had authored the letter without adequate proof. A Dow Jones spokesperson said the company stood behind its reporting and would defend the suit vigorously.
The lawsuit is one of several Trump has filed against major news organizations since returning to office, a pattern his critics characterize as an attempt to chill press freedom. The Wall Street Journal case is notable because Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp empire owns Dow Jones, is named as a defendant alongside the reporters — an unusual targeting of a media proprietor who has long enjoyed close relations with Republican administrations.
The third strand of this week’s Epstein files story ran through Morningside Heights, where Columbia University has been conducting a painful institutional reckoning with its own entanglement with Epstein. Documents released earlier this year showed that in 2012, Epstein orchestrated a sequence of emails, donations, and personal lobbying to secure admission to the university’s College of Dental Medicine for his then-girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, after her application had been rejected. As Bloomberg Law reported, the scheme unfolded through Thomas Magnani, a Manhattan dentist and Columbia alumnus who acted as the intermediary, arranging campus tours and transmitting Shuliak’s transcripts to the then-dean at Epstein’s behest. Epstein donated at least $50,000 in Shuliak’s name and paid her tuition directly.
Columbia acknowledged in a statement that “a student was admitted to the dental school through an irregular process, coinciding with fundraising solicitations by former academic and alumni leadership of the school.” The university took disciplinary action against Magnani and Dr. Letty Moss-Salentijn, a faculty member who had served as Shuliak’s mentor and helped develop a personalized study plan for her after she was admitted. Columbia also committed to donating $210,000 in Epstein-related funds to nonprofits supporting survivors of sexual abuse and human trafficking. The university is reviewing its dental school admissions practices. Shuliak herself, who graduated in 2015 and was named as a beneficiary in Epstein’s estate two days before his death, has not been accused of wrongdoing by Columbia.
The Columbia revelations were part of a broader pattern documented in the Epstein files showing how the financier used donations and social leverage to build influence inside American universities, a strategy that served multiple purposes: it burnished his intellectual reputation, created networks of obligation among credentialed professionals, and, in the accounts of survivors provided to congressional investigators, was used to lure and silence victims by promising them academic placements and tuition payments. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent letters to Columbia and New York University in January seeking cooperation with the committee’s investigation into how Epstein had used institutional access to further his sex trafficking operation.
The convergence of these three storylines on a single Friday underscored a reality that has defined the Epstein files saga from its beginning: the documents do not resolve the questions they raise. They open new chambers. Bondi’s deposition, whenever its transcript is released, will add another layer of contested testimony to a record already thick with evasions, redactions, and selective memory. The Wall Street Journal lawsuit will proceed through courts that have generally held press freedom to be robust, even against a sitting president. Columbia’s review will produce a report that will satisfy no one and acknowledge what everyone already knows. And the files themselves — millions of pages, most of them mundane, some of them explosive — will continue to be read by investigators, journalists, and people who simply want to understand how a man as brazen as Jeffrey Epstein operated so openly, for so long, inside institutions that should have stopped him.
As the testimony of Sarah Kellen before the committee last week made clear, the survivors’ accounts remain the most irreducible element of the entire investigation. Their names were exposed in the botched initial release of the files — an error that Bondi has called inadvertent and that lawmakers have described as a serious breach of the government’s duty of care. Repairing that breach, rather than relitigating who was to blame for it, remains the most urgent unfinished business before the committee.
For additional background on the broader investigation, the timeline of Bondi’s defiance of the earlier subpoena and the committee’s expansion of the probe to other elite networks provide essential context for understanding the scope of what lawmakers are attempting to document.
