It was the kind of day in Washington that required a late-night debrief with 10,000 people watching. Lev Parnas, still in his suit from a marathon day on Capitol Hill, joined Dean Blundell, Zev Shalev, and Ellie Leonard to break down what may have been the most consequential day yet in the fight for the Epstein files — and the growing evidence that the people trying hardest to bury them are doing so to protect the President of the United States.
Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before a congressional oversight committee and completely imploded. Epstein survivors stood behind her in white shirts for the duration of the hearing. She never turned around to face them. Not once. “This is the Attorney General of the United States of America,” Parnas said from Washington. “These are American citizens. She discounted them like they did not exist.” When survivors were asked whether the DOJ or FBI had contacted them, every single one said no. When asked if they had tried to reach the department, every single one said yes. Bondi’s response to thirty years of institutional failure was to tell them to call the FBI tip line — again.
The hearing exposed Bondi’s strategy as pure deflection — invoking the Dow, accusing members of anti-Semitism, pivoting to immigration stats that Democrats had already prosecuted. Parnas, who watched much of the hearing from inside the room, drew the direct parallel: when Kaitlan Collins asks Trump the wrong question, he insults her, threatens to sue. Bondi ran the same playbook. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett cut through it best, dismissing Bondi’s talking points about convicted immigrants by noting they were convicted under prior administrations — then walking out when Bondi tried to eat into her time with non-answers. Ted Lieu confronted Bondi with documentation showing Trump discussed the rape of a girl with Jeffrey Epstein while a limo driver overheard, and that the girl was later found dead, ruled a homicide. Bondi had earlier acknowledged such evidence would constitute a crime — then refused to apply that standard when Trump’s name was attached. Representative Balint was called anti-Semitic by Bondi for pressing on the files; her grandparents survived the Holocaust.
The most telling detail: not once during the entire hearing did Bondi say the President didn’t do those things. “She kept saying, oh, you don’t know about this guy, you don’t know about that crime, the Dow is at 50,000,” Shalev noted. “But she not once said the President didn’t do those things. Because that would have been perjuring herself. Because she knows he did those things and she can’t lie about it under oath.”
The GOP, despite promising survivors all week they would ask hard questions, delivered nothing. “Look at their actions, not what they say,” Parnas said. “They basically showed you what we always talk about.” The MAGA base wants the Epstein files released. The Republican members ignored that demand entirely. Both Parnas and Shalev read this as a signal that the GOP isn’t worried about elections — because they may not be planning to have fair ones. Parnas shared intelligence from his sources indicating that Tulsi Gabbard, Bondi, CIA Director Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel are coordinating a plan to subpoena voting rolls from Georgia and other states, with the goal of manufacturing a “China interference” narrative to justify federalizing elections in up to fifteen states under a national security emergency. The Save America Act, Parnas noted, is part of Project 2025, crafted by Russell Vought and Stephen Miller to enable exactly this kind of federal takeover.
Michael Cohen, meanwhile, spent the day making himself the story — which may be exactly the point. After appearing on Joy-Ann Reid’s show, where he tried to convince a lawyer he’d never met that they had in fact worked together on a Jane Doe case — reading out text exchanges in which the lawyer repeatedly told him “I don’t know who you are” — Cohen landed in the DMs of both Parnas and Ellie Leonard demanding apologies. “Offering you yet again an opportunity to make this right and acknowledge the error,” Cohen texted Parnas at 3:12 PM, minutes after his Reid appearance. “Apology is actually a demonstration of strength, not weakness. Feel free to call me if you choose to apologize.”
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