Former Attorney General Pam Bondi walked into a Congress building with a bandage visibly covering her neck hours after undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer.
Bondi has made her highly anticipated return to Washington, D.C., where she will face questions from the House Oversight Committee about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
She will speak with lawmakers behind closed doors on Friday after the House panel voted in March to subpoena Bondi as part of the panel’s Epstein investigation. However, Bondi’s hearing will not proceed as originally intended by the panel members.
Under their initial plan, the subpoena would have required the former attorney general to sit for a formal deposition and testify under oath. The entire proceedings would have also been video-recorded for public record.
However, Bondi’s hearing will not proceed as originally intended by the panel members. Under their initial plan, the subpoena would have required the former attorney general to sit for a formal deposition and testify under oath.
And, as a result, her deposition was downgraded to a transcribed interview, which does not require a swearing-in or recording. Bondi’s reappearance in the nation’s capital comes after the former AG was diagnosed and treated for thyroid cancer.
It was reported that the former Trump official was diagnosed after departing the Justice Department and that she has spent the recent month “recovering” from surgery and was “doing well.” A source close to Bondi told Axios that she received the diagnosis “shortly after” leaving the Justice Department. They added that she undergone treatment and is recovering.
The news of Bondi’s cancer treatment, first reported by Axios, came alongside her appointment to an advisory committee focused on AI policy.
The former attorney general will serve on the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which is led by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios and includes more than a dozen tech executives, Axios reported.
“Pam has been an enormously valuable asset to the president’s team, and I’m thrilled for her and for all of us that she’s going to remain involved in confronting some of the most important issues the administration faces,” Vice President JD Vance said in a statement.
Before her ouster from the Justice Department, Bondi had positioned herself as the chief defender of Trump.
Besieged by questions over Jeffrey Epstein and accusations of a weaponized Justice Department, Bondi aggressively pivoted in an extraordinary speech in February in which she mocked her Democratic questioners, praised Trump over the performance of the stock market and openly aligned herself as in sync with a president whom she painted as a victim of past impeachments and investigations, The Associated Press reported.
“You sit here, and you attack the president, and I’m not going to have it,” Bondi told lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee. “I am not going to put up with it.”
But Trump dismissed Bondi from the Justice Department after he had reportedly grown frustrated with her over her failure to prosecute his political enemies aggressively enough, and for her much-criticized handling of the Epstein files.
In a social media post in September, Trump ordered Bondi to indict several of his perceived political enemies, complaining that she had not done so fast enough.
“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leditia??? They’re guilty as hell but nothing is going to be done,’” Trump said of New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director James Comey and California Sen. Adam Schiff.
