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Late-night hosts recapped US attorney general Pam Bondi’s contentious congressional hearing as she faced tough questions over the justice department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel opened Wednesday’s monologue with a begrudging acknowledgement that Donald Trump won the one and only “Undisputed Champion of Coal Award” from an organization called “the Washington Coal Club”. The prize “brings his real award total to zero”, he joked.
“All he wants is awards and for everything to be named after him,” he continued. “The Kennedy Center, Dulles airport, Penn Station – I mean, if that’s the way to keep him happy, I have another suggestion for something we could name after him. And it’s big, and I’ll think he’ll like it, because it’s something that everyone is talking about. It’s something that he actually, unlike most everything else he wants named after him, deserves to be a part of.”
The host proposed adding his name to the Epstein files – “or, with your cooperation and the cooperation of others, will heretofore be known as the Trump-Epstein files”.
Kimmel then tore into the files, which have become the defining albatross around the Trump administration’s neck. Though the US justice department accidentally published many of the victims’ names, it has also redacted many Epstein co-conspirators, including the US president, who reportedly appears in the files about 1m times.
“And that doesn’t even include the 3m pages they still haven’t released,” Kimmel reminded. “Which obviously puts Maga in a bit of a fix. Popping up a million times obviously isn’t a positive for the Pizzagate party. So now they’re grabbing at anything they can,” including a document that says when authorities were closing in on Epstein for the first time in 2006, Trump called the police chief in Palm Beach, Florida and said: “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.”
“And that’s the evidence they want people to see right now,” Kimmel marveled.
The ongoing saga of the Epstein files was the talk of Capitol Hill on Wednesday, where Bondi appeared unrepentant before a congressional panel. Bondi refused to apologize to several Epstein victims present in the gallery, but did accuse multiple lawmakers, including Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky, of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
“Yes, the ultra-conservative congressman from Kentucky who endorsed Trump three times has ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’,” Kimmel responded. “Trump himself, the man who tweeted the Obamas as monkeys the other day? Solid as a rock. Everyone else is deranged.
“I mean, seriously, there’s nothing to defend here,” he continued. “This Department of Justice is hiding the names of people who were not victims. Why are they doing that? If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding names? That’s it. That’s the only question anybody needs to ask.
“It’s maddening,” he concluded. “It is a brazen cover-up.”
The Daily Show
And on the Daily Show, Jordan Klepper savored a particularly cringeworthy moment from the Winter Olympics, when the Norwegian skier Sturla Holm Lægreid won the bronze medal in the men’s 20km biathlon and then admitted, in a viral post-race interview, that he had cheated on his girlfriend of six months. “It has been the worst week of my life,” he said, in a plea to win her back.
“I would’ve gone with a ‘thank you, mom and dad’ or a ‘thank you, God’, but instead you went with ‘guess what, world, I can’t keep it in my pants,’” Klepper laughed.
“You know what, if repairing your six-month situationship is that important, I guess it’s fine to hijack the news cycle to talk about it. I’m sure your teammate who won the gold had nothing more important to draw attention to.”
In fact, it was a very emotional win for fellow Norwegian Johan-Olav Botn. Botn dedicated his gold medal to their late teammate Sivert Guttorm Bakken, who died unexpectedly in December. “Oh right, our dead teammate! I was between honoring him or talking about how much pussy I was getting,” Klepper joked. “Dude, come on! You hijacked that to try to win back your fling? This is basically like if instead of interrupting Taylor Swift, Kanye had interrupted the in memoriam segment.”
Later in the segment, Klepper touched on Bondi’s vituperative appearance before Congress. “You’d be in a bad mood too if you spent the last month redacting old man genitals from the Epstein files,” he joked. Bondi, who reacted angrily to any questions from lawmakers, “acted like a bratty senior who got called into the principal’s office”.
“Her performance upset a lot of people, because they were hoping for justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims,” he noted. “But for Pam Bondi, there’s only one victim in all of this.”
That would be Donald Trump. Bondi repeatedly called for public apologies to the man she also called “the greatest president in American history” as well as “the most transparent president in the nation’s history”.
Klepper was not impressed: “If you’re going to embarrass yourself on national television like that, at least win a bronze medal first.”
