Pam Bondi Reveals Shock Reason Trump Goon Was Scrubbed From Epstein Files

Politics admin June 5, 2026 0 Comments

Pam Bondi Reveals Shock Reason Trump Goon Was Scrubbed From Epstein Files

Pam Bondi’s excuse for why a photo of President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary was wiped and subsequently re-added to the Justice Department’s published documents of the Epstein files has been revealed.

During her closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee last week, the axed former Attorney General spilled on the story behind a particular photo of Howard Lutnick, who had his own hearing last month about his relationship with disgraced sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is a photograph that was produced on January 30th,” the committee said, according to the of the hearing released on Thursday. “It appears to be — and the committee’s understanding is that it is — a photograph of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other individuals with Mr. Epstein on Mr. Epstein’s island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

“The photo was reportedly included in the initial production on January 30th, then taken down, and then reposted after there were press inquiries on the subject. Do you have an understanding of why this image was taken down?” the committee asked Bondi.

“I do. I believe that Deputy Attorney General Blanche or his staff believed that this was AI for some reason and not real,” Bondi, 60, explained.

“It was taken down, but it was put back up,” she added. “I’m not sure if it was intentionally taken down, but it was put back up because it was confirmed that it was Howard Lutnick and his family.”

Asked whether she had “direct or indirect knowledge” that the photo was removed for political reasons, Bondi declined to answer.

Bondi’s comments are in contrast to what the DOJ claimed at the time.

“This image was part of a batch of files that were flagged for nudity,” a DOJ official said in February. “The batch of thousands of images was pulled for review and is being uploaded with necessary redactions on a rolling basis. No files are being deleted.”

The DOJ did not immediately return the Daily Beast’s request for comment on Bondi’s testimony and apparent contradiction.

The picture of Lutnick was initially located by “jmail,” a site run by two tech workers who created a searchable version of Epstein’s Gmail inbox by downloading all the latest released files.

At the time, the group posted a link on its “jmailarchive,” to the image, which shows a DOJ file name. The file name, EFTA01230639, did not match any results in the DOJ’s Epstein website, suggesting it had been deleted.

Bondi told committee members that Trump’s former personal lawyer, 51, “oversaw the entire investigation,” and that he was in charge of determining which documents would be released to the public.

She also frequently deferred responsibility to FBI Director Kash Patel over a number of issues raised by the committee.

Lutnick himself appeared before the House Oversight Committee on May 6 after he gave contradictory remarks over his cozy relationship to Epstein.

“If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript, he would have fired Howard Lutnick,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who spearheaded the EFTA, told reporters after the commerce secretary’s hearing. “It was really embarrassing.”

Despite telling a New York Post podcast last year that he had cut off all contact with Epstein–whose New York City home he moved his family next door to–after he said he was creeped out by the financier’s massage room, DOJ files proved that was untrue.

Files released as part of the Epstein Files Transparency Act revealed that Lutnick, 64, had corresponded with Epstein via email far later than he had claimed, including after the sex offender pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008 and even in 2018, a year before Epstein took his own life in his New York prison cell.