Johnson warns Pam Bondi against spying on Congress members’ Epstein search histories: ‘We can’t allow for that’

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned Thursday that he’s looking into allegations that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is tracking the search histories of members of Congress who looked up files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

During Attorney General Bondi’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, a photographer captured a page out of her briefing binder that appeared to show a document detailing the files that Rep. Pramila Jayapal had searched on a DOJ computer.

Members of Congress are allowed to search the un-redacted versions of files related to the convicted pedophile and sex trafficker Epstein, who committed suicide in custody in 2019 as he awaited trial in New York City. But the photo of Jayapal’s apparent search in Bondi’s so-called “burn book,” as some House members labeled it, raised alarm bells among members of Congress.

“I've heard the allegations I'm looking into that myself,” Johnson told The Independent on Thursday. “It would obviously be an important line that's crossed, and obviously we can't allow for that.”

The image from Bondi’s hearing binder immediately caused outrage.

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“We’re out there trying to do our investigative oversight, and they’ve structured a situation where they’re basically spying on our every move,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told The Independent.

“So the attorney general knows what material we've looked at,” he said. “I would have liked to have known what material she was looking at before she came in.”

Bondi delivered contentious and combative testimony before the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that often devolved into her petty and personal sniping against Democrats. And despite her acknowledging the survivors of Epstein’s abuse in her opening remarks, when many of them stood up behind her during the hearing, Bondi did not turn around to face them.

The issue has dogged Bondi going back to when she told Fox News last year that she had a “client list” related to Epstein “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

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But she faced massive pushback when the Department of Justice and the FBI released a two-page memo last year essentially closing the investigation, saying Epstein likely killed himself and that he did not have a “client list.”

That prompted a bipartisan coalition to force a vote to release the files with the support of many of Epstein’s survivors that passed almost unanimously in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate.

Since then, many members of Congress have criticized the nature of the release of the files, saying they are filled with redactions of potential co-conspirators of Epstein’s or that they revealed the names of survivors.

“Pam Bondi has not been complying with the law, and now she's making it harder for members of Congress to do her job, that is wrong,” Rep. Deborah Ross of North Carolina told The Independent. Ross also said that the revelation worried her.

“That development made me change my strategy — It means that I'm going to come up with a strategy for when I do it,” she noted. Ross also said that Bondi is looking up members' search history "for the same reason that she has a burn book."

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The lack of outrage by many Republicans stands in stark contrast to how many of them claimed that special counsel Jack Smith “tapped” their phone records as part of his investigation into President Donald Trump.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina put a provision in a spending bill to allow senators to sue the government if their phone records were searched by the federal government without their knowledge.

The House would later repeal that provision. But Democrats said in that case, the president chose whom he called in his plot to overturn the election.

“Here we're talking about just a refusal to look at what is in the Department of Justice's files, but instead trying to attack the folks who are doing the investigative work,” Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, another member of the Justice Department, told The Independent.

“It definitely has a chilling factor, sure,” Scanlon said. “I'm wondering if I can, apparently, one of the issues is you have to log in, yeah, under your name. I'm wondering if I could log in under Donald Trump or something.”