Nasty neighbors: Trump’s Cabinet goes ‘gutter’ in clashes with Congress

Attorney General Pam Bondi, taking her seat in the House Judiciary Committee hearing room last week, was met with an admonition by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the panel’s senior Democrat, who told her to be respectful and not to filibuster her answers.

Most important, he told her, ditch the “burn book” — a collection of opposition research used to attack her questioners.

Ms. Bondi did not heed the advice. Over the course of the next five hours, she mocked, belittled, chided and lacerated her questioners.

She called Mr. Raskin a “washed-up loser lawyer.” She demanded apologies from Democrats involved in the impeachment efforts against President Trump. She called Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, a “failed politician” infected by “Trump derangement syndrome.”

At another point, she unloaded on Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont, suggesting that the Jewish Democrat was antisemitic.

“Oh, do you want to go there?” Ms. Balint fumed. “You’re talking about antisemitism to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust.”

Ms. Bondi’s appearance followed a pattern of increasingly nasty exchanges between Congress and members of Mr. Trump’s Cabinet.

In his appearance before the House earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent repeatedly interrupted Democrats’ questions, said one wasn’t asking “serious” questions and called another “confused.” She accused him of “demeaning” her.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem infuriated Democrats in December when she sparred with them over illegal immigrant arrests and then left the hearing early, claiming she had an emergency management meeting to attend. Democrats later said they had investigated and found no such meeting.

“It’s not normal. There’s nothing normal about this,” said Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute. He said congressional hearings have been deteriorating for years, but Ms. Bondi’s appearance was a low point.

“This is not what you’d advise a Cabinet official, or anybody in the executive branch, to do,” he said. “Not only was it doing this unprecedented thing of breaking norms and going after legislators, it’s doing it in a way that creates viral moments against you.”

He said officials usually try to play nice, if for no other reason than because Capitol Hill sets their budgets and making enemies can be a bad strategy.

Ms. Bondi was appearing for an “oversight” hearing, where lawmakers are given free rein to ask questions about matters within her purview.

For Democrats, that mostly meant talking about the department’s compliance with a new law demanding the release of the Justice Department’s files about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Ms. Bondi rebuffed questions by demanding to know why Democrats didn’t pepper her predecessor in the Biden era, Merrick Garland, with the same inquiries.

After a particularly rough set of questions from Rep. Daniel Goldman, Ms. Bondi turned to her dossier to pull out photos of three men she said were illegal immigrant criminals arrested in New York, Mr. Goldman’s state.

“He represents New York, wow, yet he doesn’t care about the illegal aliens convicted of crimes,” she said.

It wasn’t that Ms. Bondi lacked answers to the Epstein questions. When Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Republican, asked her why victims’ names were released in error, she said it was because Congress had set an impossible deadline to release all the documents within 30 days.

When Mr. Roy asked whether others were being probed for their collaboration with Epstein, she said investigations were “pending.”

She refused to answer Democrats, complaining that they didn’t give her enough time to speak.

Rep. Hank Johnson, Georgia Democrat, called it a “Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of routine.” That left the attorney general miffed: “What does ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ mean? Can you explain that?”

When asked by another Democratic lawmaker to apologize to Epstein victims attending the hearing, she declined. “I’m not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics,” the attorney general said.

The performance didn’t seem to cost Ms. Bondi with Republicans.

“I thought the attorney general handled herself very well,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chaired the hearing. He said the pushback from Cabinet members makes sense given the level of vitriol against Mr. Trump.

“Democrats have been going after the president for a decade. This Trump derangement syndrome is a real phenomenon. Of course, people are going to push back because they’re constantly being attacked,” he said.

The White House said it supported its Cabinet officials in the recent contretemps with Congress.

“The entire Trump administration will always push back against Democrat lies, no matter the time or place. The American people deserve the truth,” said Abigail Jackson, a presidential spokeswoman.

Some dust-ups of years past have been notable.

In 2002, the Senate’s senior Democrat, Robert C. Byrd, got into a surreal dispute with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill over who grew up poorer, as each tried to claim to be the better spokesman for the downtrodden.

In 2018, Brett M. Kavanaugh apologized after an angry clash over alcohol use during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat.

In the Biden administration, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ appearances routinely managed to get under Republicans’ skin, to the point that he was impeached for glib answers to Congress proclaiming the clearly broken border to be “secure.”

Mr. Huder said the move to defang the Senate filibuster and allow presidential nominees to be confirmed by a majority vote may have emboldened some administration witnesses to take a more combative stance.

It’s not just the Trump administration witnesses who are combative.

A day after Ms. Bondi’s appearance, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a former House member, appeared before a Senate hearing where he resisted even confirming for Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, that he was the state’s attorney general. It got worse from there, to a point where, during the exchange, Mr. Hawley was frothing at the lip.

James Thurber, a longtime observer of Washington politics at American University, said past dust-ups received attention because they were humorous or because of the weighty, fact-based debates involved.

That has fallen by the wayside as polarization and gridlock have “totally undermined the norms of civility and respect in Congress in the last three decades.”

Even still, he said Ms. Bondi “hit a new low of ‘kindergarten playground’ personal attacks.”

“She was speaking to an audience of one, President Trump,” he said. “She attacked, never apologized and praised the president.”

Zack Schram, who spent years on Capitol Hill as a staffer and is now with Wayne State University’s Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, said hearings have always had some performative elements, but when done right, they provide a chance for all sides to work toward a common understanding of facts.

Hearings that focus on clashes erode that purpose.

“I’ve had a 20-year career on the Hill, and it’s certainly more extreme, more confrontational,” he said. “When it’s all combat, then the spectacle is the purpose. In my view, it doesn’t advance any public interest in reaching and publicizing a common understanding of the facts.”

He said the irony is that much of the spectacle disappears when Congress goes behind closed doors.

“There’s none of the performative outrage or the attempt to break through with some clever remark that makes for a 15-second story,” he said. “In those closed hearings, you can conduct real business. There’s a certain candor, but it’s a candor that’s related to the policy and the facts.”

• Lindsey McPherson, Jeff Mordock and Mallory Wilson contributed to this report.