Bondi Bristles

Plus: the attorney general's self-inflicted wounds, religious revivals, and Congress votes to stop Trump's tariffs on Canada

Pam Bondi snaps at Congressmen. Over the course of five hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Pam Bondi gave increasingly agitated responses to members' questions about the Epstein files her department recently released.

She called ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.) a "washed-up loser lawyer" and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) a "failed politician" with "Trump derangement syndrome."

At the hearing, members pressed Bondi on a range of things related to Jeffrey Epstein and her department's release of documents related to the dead, disgraced financier. In particular, representatives pressed Bondi on why material on Epstein's associates was redacted, but the names, pictures, and other sensitive information of victims were not.

For the most part, Bondi did not give direct answers, preferring instead insults and odd nonsequiturs about how the stock market was at record heights.

On the one hand, one can understand some of Bondi's frustrations. Committee hearings like yesterday's are largely political theater.

A lot of Democrats' "questions" were really just partisan grandstanding, like when Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.) asked Epstein victims in the audience to stand so that Bondi could apologize to them for failing to redact their names.

Bondi wasn't wrong when she said several times that Democrats did not care that much about Epstein when Joe Biden was president and Merrick Garland was attorney general.

Still, even when Democrats asked more measured, substantive questions, like when Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.) pressed Bondi on whether some of Epstein's emails suggested that there were still coconspirators left to prosecute, the attorney general still resorted to evasions and insults.

A problem of one's own making. Generally, it's hard to feel any sympathy for Bondi at all. The debacle over the Epstein files is one of her own making.

It was Bondi who seemed to say in an interview that she had Epstein's (probably mythical) client list sitting on her desk waiting to be released, before walking it back. It was Bondi who made a big show of giving right-wing influencers binders labeled "Epstein files" filled with redacted or already public documents.

That game of promising more transparency on Epstein while offering none has spectacularly backfired. In the end, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in a near-unanimous vote. When asked follow-up questions about those files, Bondi broke down.

Even in the face of partisan, showy committee questions, it would be nice to have an attorney general who was modestly professional and interested in transparency.

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Scenes from D.C.: The latest war of religion has broken out on X about whether America's youth is becoming more Christian and, more specifically, more Catholic.

Researcher and former pastor Ryan Burge says not really. Per Burge, 2023's surge in Catholicism was an outlier. Every year since then has shown a steady, stagnant percentage of Catholic Zoomers.

There is no surge of Catholicism among Gen Z.

The 2023 Cooperative Election Study showed a surge in Catholic numbers.

It was clearly an outlier.

The 2024 data was right back to baseline - 15%. pic.twitter.com/fYphTIYYRj

— Ryan Burge ???? (@ryanburge) February 11, 2026

I'd really encourage everyone to listen to Burge's recent appearance on Ross Douthat's podcast, where he breaks down America's religiosity in more detail.

But a stagnating church is not the case in Washington, D.C., says Robert Schmad in response to Burge's post.

We have a lot of data points confirming there is no national mass Catholic conversion among American youths.

Staffers in DC, however, certainly think it's happening. That's because - among them specifically - there absolutely is an ongoing conversion movement.

At social… https://t.co/Roqgf9Gbkl

— robert schmad (@RobertSchmad) February 12, 2026

My own anecdotal experience matches Schmad's take. My 150-year-old D.C. parish has welcomed record numbers of converts in recent years. Long-time parishioners tell me that Mass attendance has exploded.

Perhaps that's just more evidence of Catholic decline: A shrinking number of faithful are concentrating in fewer, more vibrant parishes.

Or maybe not. The next Great Awakening has to start somewhere. Perhaps centralized nodes of intense religiosity are what's necessary to revive true religion in America.

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QUICK LINKS

• James Van Der Beek, a man of apparent Dutch ancestry and an actor on TV's Dawson's Creek, died at age 48.
• Larry Sharpe is running for public office again.
• Johnathan Haidt is in The Free Press taking a victory lap for popularizing the case against youths' smartphone use.
• The Federal Trade Commission chairman warns that Apple News' alleged political bias might be an antitrust violation in a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
• The House votes to stop President Donald Trump's tariffs on Canada.
• The FBI tracked down an anonymous 4chan conspiracy theorist because of claims he made about Epstein.