Attorney General Pam Bondi spent hours before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday defending the Justice Department’s release of “3 million pages” related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The number was repeated so often, it began to sound like an argument in itself, as though transparency could be proved by volume alone.
But the hearing’s most revealing moment did not involve a statistic. It came when survivors of Epstein abuses sitting in the room disclosed that documents released by the Justice Department included their real names and, in some instances, nude images without adequate redaction. Meanwhile, the identities of powerful men remained shielded. The asymmetry was hard to ignore.
Bondi’s combative demeanor throughout the hearing intensified an already serious problem.
Bondi’s combative demeanor throughout the hearing intensified an already serious problem: Instead of treating oversight as the kind of accountability her office exists to fulfill, she often met questions with deflection and edge, including calling a member of Congress a “loser lawyer.” That kind of display diminishes the office she holds and makes her repeated reference to “3 million pages” feel more like a talking point than a reckoning.
In criminal practice, redactions are not cosmetic edits. They are safeguards. Once a survivor’s trauma becomes searchable, it cannot be retracted. A “low error rate” does not mitigate that harm. The question is not how many pages were released but whether the Justice Department exercised the kind of judgment that sensitive disclosures demand.
When members of Congress pressed Bondi to apologize directly, she expressed regret about “the process” and returned to the page count. It’s worth nothing that Bondi served as Florida’s attorney general for several years after Epstein’s conviction for solicitation, when he was a public figure; this makes her current posture of urgent “transparency” harder to take at face value without more candor or care. When the survivors in the room were asked during the hearing whether the Justice Department had consulted them before releasing the files, none of them raised their hand. Oversight was met less with reflection than with defensiveness.
That posture matters. Oversight is part of our constitutional design. Congress questions members of the executive branch to preserve legitimacy, even if, yes, some lawmakers do use such occasions to try to score political points. Ultimately, when scrutiny is met with defensiveness rather than reflection, the public is left to wonder what the institution is protecting — its mission or its reputation.
For years now, Americans have debated the “weaponization of justice.” The phrase is often used as a partisan accusation, sometimes carelessly. But justice does not become politicized only when prosecutions target opponents. It can also drift toward politics when legal decisions are framed for messaging advantage, when document releases become narrative events and when institutional output is defended more vigorously than institutional judgment is examined.
The Epstein files release fits uneasily within that broader trend. Transparency is being framed as a headline — 3 Million Pages! — rather than as a careful balance between public accountability and private dignity. Victim consultation appears to have been absent. The instinct, at least publicly, has been to defend the metric or compliance with the letter of the law rather than to focus on the harm.
This concern extends beyond one hearing and this one issue. In the past decade, prosecutorial culture at both federal and state levels has edged closer to politics. Campaign rhetoric has blurred into prosecutorial ambition. Investigations have unfolded in press conferences. Legal developments increasingly carry political resonance before they reach legal finality. Each episode may be defensible on its own terms. Taken together, they erode a foundational norm: restraint. The Justice Department’s authority rests not merely on statutory power but also on public trust, the belief that prosecutorial decisions are guided by professional judgment and insulated from political incentives. That trust is fragile. It weakens through dramatic abuses but also through smaller signals: defensiveness over humility, messaging over method, institutional protection over human impact. Of course, mistakes in document review can happen in any large disclosure. What distinguishes a healthy institution is how it responds. Does it treat oversight as an opportunity to correct course or as a threat to be deflected? Does it center those harmed, or does it retreat into metrics? The survivors sitting in that congressional hearing room did not need a document count. The survivors sitting in that congressional hearing room did not need a document count. They needed assurance that the institution charged with protecting them understood the gravity of what it had released and was prepared to learn from events. Justice is not measured in pages but in judgment. And when legal judgment appears subordinate to optics, public confidence in the system inevitably erodes.
Duncan Levin is a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor who serves as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and is a frequent contributor to MS NOW. 
