Democrat demands Trump ‘come clean' on Epstein files as FBI's Bongino and Patel mull quitting after Bondi blowup
The Trump administration faced a storm of backlash this week after a DOJ memo revealed the late sex offender had no secret client list, contradicting Bondi's February claim that it was 'sitting on my desk.'
Bondi also reaffirmed that Epstein's 2019 death was a suicide by strangulation despite conspiracy theories suggesting otherwise. That upset many MAGA Trump supporters who expected major revelations based on earlier official statements.
Jen Psaki, the host of The Briefing on MSNBC, asked Raskin on Friday why he thinks Bondi 'is holding back.'
'[M]any of these people have gestured at the existence of a client list, so this is a vast public perception now without regard to ideological lines,' Raskin said.
'People believe that the client list is out there. And look, this guy was a real child sex offender, and they ran a child sex ring,' Raskin continued.
'So, we know that MAGA took that ball and ran all the way down the field with it, and they're alleging satanic child sex rings and so on. That has done huge damage to America's political and civic culture.'
Raskin also questioned why President Donald Trump hasn't released the list despite demanding transparency, suggesting the president may be implicated, protecting others, or using the information as leverage. He feels it's now best 'for everybody to come clean.'
'I'm gonna be asking Chairman Jordan to call for a hearing where we subpoena the attorney general and Dan Bongino and Kash Patel to come in and tell us everything that we know because this thing is really spinning out of control at this point,' he said.
'And there's one way to put it to rest, which is to come clean, as President Trump promised he would during the campaign.'
Bongino took the day off from work on Friday, Axios reports, and a source close to Bongino said "he ain't coming back."
However, a White House spokesperson called the resignation rumors 'baseless.'
Spokesperson Harrison Fields told The Independent Saturday, 'President Trump has assembled a highly qualified and experienced law and order team dedicated to protecting Americans, holding criminals accountable, and delivering justice to victims. This work is being carried out seamlessly and with unity. Any attempt to sow division within this team is baseless and distracts from the real progress being made in restoring public safety and pursuing justice for all.'
The Independent has contacted representatives for Bongino, Patel, and Bondi for comment.
Also Friday, CNN's Kaitlan Collins told Anderson Cooper on AC360 that the endgame could boil down to who Trump supports more.
'We have heard that Kash Patel is outright threatening to resign. I think he's sympathetic to Dan Bongino, who is his number two, and they work very closely together. There's just a wall that separates their offices,' she said.
Collins added that Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer is pushing for Bondi's removal, but said it appears unlikely to happen.
'What it shows, Anderson, is that this is all kind of their own making, because Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi were three of the officials who pushed a lot of the information when it came to Jeffrey Epstein,' Collins said.
'And so officials inside the White House are very frustrated because they feel like this news cycle is only getting worse for them. It is not from people that they can easily dismiss or say it's the media or Democrats. It is their own base that is so furious and so angry over how they've handled this. And the question is how they get out of it.'
Earlier this week, Trump dismissed renewed interest in Epstein, criticizing a reporter for asking about the DOJ announcing there is no 'client list.'
'Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years,' Trump said. 'Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.'
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The incident, which was horrifying even by the standards of a platform that has become a haven for extreme speech, has raised uncomfortable questions about accountability when AI chatbots go rogue. When an automated system breaks the rules, who bears the blame, and what should the consequences be? But it also demonstrated the shocking incidents that can spring from two deeper problems with generative AI, the technology powering Grok and rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The code update, which was reverted after 16 hours, gave the bot instructions including 'you tell like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.' The bot was also told to be 'maximally based,' a slang term for being assertive and controversial, and to 'not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.' The prompts 'undesirably steered [Grok] to ignore its core values' and reinforce 'user-triggered leanings, including any hate speech,' X's statement said on Saturday. 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'I think we're going to see more courts saying [these companies] don't get immunity: They're creating the content, they're profiting from it, it's their chatbot that they supposedly did such a beautiful job creating.' Grok's diatribe came after Musk asked for help training the chatbot to be more 'politically incorrect.' On July 4, he announced his company had 'improved Grok significantly.' Within days, the tool was attacking Jewish surnames, echoing neo-Nazi viewpoints and calling for the mass detention of Jews in camps. The Anti-Defamation League called Grok's messages 'irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic.' Musk, in a separate X post, said the problem was 'being addressed' and had stemmed from Grok being 'too compliant to user prompts,' making it 'too eager to please and be manipulated.' X's chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, resigned Wednesday but offered no indication her departure was related to Grok. AI researchers and observers have speculated about xAI's engineering choices and combed through its public code repository in hopes of explaining Grok's offensive plunge. But companies can shape the behavior of a chatbot in multiple ways, making it difficult for outsiders to pin down the cause. The possibilities include changes to the material xAI used to initially train the AI model or the data sources Grok accesses when answering questions, adjustments based on feedback from humans, and changes to the written instructions that tell a chatbot how it should generally behave. Some believe the problem was out in the open all along: Musk invited users to send him information that was 'politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true' to fold into Grok's training data. It could have combined with toxic data commonly found in AI-training sets from sites such as 4chan, the message board infamous for its legacy of hate speech and trolls. Online sleuthing led Talia Ringer, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to suspect that Grok's personality shift could have been a 'soft launch' of the new Grok 4 version of the chatbot, which Musk introduced in a live stream late Thursday. But Ringer could not be sure because the company has said so little. 'In a reasonable world I think Elon would have to take responsibility for this and explain what actually happened, but I think instead he will stick a [Band-Aid] on it and the product will still' get used, they said. The episode disturbed Ringer enough to decide not to incorporate Grok into their work, they said. 'I cannot reasonably spend [research or personal] funding on a model that just days ago was spreading genocidal rhetoric about my ethnic group.' Will Stancil, a liberal activist, was personally targeted by Grok after X users prompted it to create disturbing sexual scenarios about him. He is now considering whether to take legal action, saying the flood of Grok posts felt endless. Stancil compared the onslaught to having 'a public figure publishing hundreds and hundreds of grotesque stories about a private citizen in an instant.' 'It's like we're on a roller coaster and he decided to take the seat belts off,' he said of Musk's approach to AI. 'It doesn't take a genius to know what's going to happen. There's going to be a casualty. And it just happened to be me.' Among tech-industry insiders, xAI is regarded as an outlier for the company's lofty technical ambitions and low safety and security standards, said one industry expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. 'They're violating all the norms that actually exist and claiming to be the most capable,' the expert said. 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