WASHINGTON — FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino butted heads with Legal professional Normal Pam Bondi earlier this week over the Trump administration’s dealing with of its Jeffrey Epstein investigation — together with a purported evaluation of the late pedophile‘s so-called “client list” that officers now say by no means existed.
The heated change prompted Bongino to take a private day Friday and he’s contemplating resigning after fewer than 4 months in his job, a supply acquainted with the matter instructed The Put up, including that Bongino’s relationship with Bondi not seems salvageable.
“I don’t think Dan comes back if Pam stays,” this individual stated, despite the fact that each events had publicly said an inside evaluation of the Epstein file yielded no smoking-gun details about his dying, high-powered associates or sickening crimes.
Issues got here to a head after the Division of Justice concluded a probe into the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s dying on the Metropolitan Correctional Heart on Aug. 10, 2019, weeks after being charged with intercourse trafficking dozens of women — some as younger as 14 years previous.
That investigation included a pile of paperwork that Bondi instructed Fox Information in February have been on her desk on the Justice Division “to be reviewed,” showing to substantiate these papers included the perv’s notorious “client list.”
“In February, I did an interview on Fox, and it’s been getting a lot of attention because I said — I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, ‘it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed,’ meaning the [Epstein] file along with the JFK and MLK files as well,” Bondi stated throughout a Cupboard assembly Tuesday.
Microsoft founder Invoice Gates, former President Invoice Clinton and Prince Andrew, Duke of York, are simply a few of the highly effective businessmen and politicians that had been photographed visiting with Epstein up to now.
Trump partied with the financier years earlier than his first run for public workplace within the Nineteen Nineties — however reportedly banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007 following an incident with a membership member’s teenage daughter.
Earlier this yr, the DOJ launched some data from its investigation that confirmed flight logs and a contact record Epstein stored earlier than his arrest in 2019, most of which had already been made public in the course of the 2021 trial of his confederate and now-convicted madam Ghislaine Maxwell.
Proper-wing social media influencers have been additionally welcomed to the White Home and handed binders titled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1,” in an apparently present of transparency by the administration, which was later extensively mocked after no new particulars of the case have been disclosed.
Trump stated in the course of the 2024 marketing campaign he’d have “no problem” releasing all information associated to Epstein if elected — together with the “client list” — saying he was “not involved” and “never went to his island” of Little St. James, the place the deceased intercourse trafficker allegedly abused his underage victims.
Along with hinting months in the past at a publication of the “client list,” Bondi had additionally instructed the FBI’s New York Discipline Workplace was “in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein.”
However her division launched a two-page memo Monday stating {that a} “systematic review” of proof concluded the 66-year-old died by suicide after impacting “over one thousand victims” and there had been “no incriminating ‘client list.’”
“There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions,” the memo famous.
“We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Requested Tuesday whether or not Epstein was presumably an intelligence asset — which some commentators had put ahead as an evidence for the phrases of a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal he secured in 2008 following earlier intercourse costs involving minors — Bondi stated: “To him being an [intelligence] agent, I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you on that.”
Former Miami US Legal professional Alex Acosta, the architect of that plea deal, was quoted as saying whereas being thought of for a place within the first Trump administration: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”
Bondi additionally shot down hypothesis {that a} lacking minute of the 10-hour surveillance footage DOJ launched together with the memo to point out nobody else entered Epstein’s Manhattan lockup was because of the age of the gear nonetheless in use by federal prisons.
“What we learned from the Bureau of Prisons was, every year, every night, they redo that video. It’s old, from like 1999, so every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing,” she stated.
“So we’re looking for that video to release that as well, showing that a minute is missing every night.”
In June, Bongino had additionally instructed Fox Information nothing within the Epstein file indicated he died of any trigger apart from suicide.
“The evidence we have in our files clearly indicates that it was, in fact, a suicide. We do have video,” the previous Fox Information host stated. “It’s not the greatest video in the world.”
