CNN
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Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared on Fox News last week to tease a major event: The Justice Department would release long-awaited documents related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
But as reporters waited inside the department and members of public watched for the tranche of documents to be released Thursday, a surprising video emerged online of several right-wing social media personalities streaming out of the White House waving small binders that read, “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”
The intent of the unannounced event was clear – get the message out from favorable figures online to drum up support for President Donald Trump’s message of transparency.
The episode encapsulated the Trump Justice Department’s unconventional approach to public relations. The strategy is in part led by White House adviser Stephen Miller and designed to keep Trump’s agenda at the forefront, sources told CNN. Miller regularly works with a team of younger aides inside the department’s Office of Public Affairs to shape the messaging strategy, the sources said.
But the files inside the binder were already in the public domain. Allies of the president were disappointed, and the strategy backfired.
“I hate to say it, but the American people can’t trust the validity of the Epstein files released today,” far-right activist Laura Loomer said in a post on X after the reveal. “It was released in an unprofessional manner with paid, partisan social media influencers to curate their binders for us. I can’t trust anything in the binder. Neither should you.”
Miller’s close communications are illustrative Trump’s political goal to end the traditional independence of the Justice Department by filling key roles with partisan loyalists rather than career officials.
DOJ officials told CNN that Miller talks to a “wide range” of individuals across the administration and said that his position as Trump’s homeland security adviser makes him “intricately involved” in the Justice Department’s immigration enforcement actions.
Still, the unusual strategy – working closely with the White House instead of seasoned public affairs professionals – has muddled the Justice Department’s messaging, despite its leader, Bondi, having decades of experience in public life as a prosecutor. One month in, her tenure has so far been marked by missteps and gaffes beyond the Epstein documents.
“The messaging has not been great,” one senior administration official conceded.
A Justice Department spokesperson told CNN in a statement that “President Trump’s Department of Justice is laser-focused on making our streets safe, deporting criminal illegals, and ending the weaponization of our justice system, and any assertion otherwise ignores the record-setting first-month accomplishments of this administration.”
“The White House will always amplify the accomplishments across the Trump Administration, including the consequential work of Attorney General Pam Bondi who is working to bring transparency and integrity back to the DOJ,” White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields told CNN. “This is a welcomed change to the previous administration whose Justice Department took over the PR strategy of the Democratic National Committee.”
Trump officials have been wary of relying on career employees across the administration, a dynamic that has also played out inside the Justice Department’s public affairs office.
During previous Democratic and Republican administrations, the office has been led by a team of political appointees with considerable experience in public relations. That team would oversee a staff made up of both political appointees and career spokespeople who serve across administrations with decades of experience.
Over the past several weeks, however, the political appointees now running the public affairs office have largely ignored career officials, and, therefore, operated without their communications expertise.
One longtime Justice Department spokesman, Joshua Stueve, resigned Thursday, citing the growing divide between career and political staff.
In his resignation letter, Stueve, a disabled Marine Corps veteran who served in nonpartisan public affairs roles for both the Defense and Justice departments for 15 years, described how previous administrations had treated the career staff with “respect and dignity.” But, he said, that had come to an end with the second Trump administration.
“I cannot continue to serve in such a hostile and toxic work environment, one where leadership at the highest levels makes clear we are not welcome or valued, much less trusted to do our jobs,” Stueve wrote in his resignation letter.
Missteps in DC and New York
In her first press conference the week after she was confirmed by the Senate, Bondi announced a lawsuit against several New York officials over so-called sanctuary policies that limit the state’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Bondi, however, misspoke from the lectern by saying that the department had “filed charges,” which is only possible in a criminal case. Though minor, the accident caused confusion in what the legal step actually entailed, including whether Democratic officials like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James were going to be arrested.
One of Bondi’s aides clarified after the press conference had concluded that it was a civil case, but the department did not send the filing out or even say which federal court district it would appear in for several hours.
Department officials told CNN the lawsuit’s sharing was delayed because it had not been publicly filed in a court docket and noted the lawsuit was part of a series of challenges to sanctuary cities that Bondi had publicly touted.
Two weeks later, as the Justice Department was managing the fallout of its efforts to dismiss the criminal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a fracture in messaging emerged between some of its leaders.
Dana Bash presses Tom Homan on alleged quid pro quo with Eric Adams
In the initial memo ordering the Adams case to be dropped, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said that the DOJ was doing so “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” But moments before Bove entered a courtroom in New York to make that case to a judge, Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle made a contradictory series of social media posts laying out a detailed critique of the evidence in the case. He also noted that the Supreme Court has made it difficult to bring corruption cases, and wrote that any attempt to successfully prosecute Adams would require significant resources.
The hundreds of pages of Epstein-related documents that Bondi released Thursday, billed as a symbol of “transparency,” again brought forward the department’s struggle with a clear messaging strategy. Trump supporters and other members of the public waited for the documents to be posted online only to be disappointed by their contents, pushing some to criticize the rollout.
One Republican congresswoman said the release was “complete disappointment.” A conservative influencer who left the White House with one of the coveted binders said he “left with an interesting souvenir.” Fox News described it as a “botched rollout.”
But while the files themselves didn’t garner support, one part of the release did: a letter from Bondi to FBI Director Kash Patel alleging that a “source” within the bureau told her that thousands of pages of additional documents about the “investigation and indictment of Epstein” had been withheld by the FBI’s New York field office. The attorney general demanded an investigation into why the documents were hidden and promised to release them once in her possession.
The letter once again laid bare the tensions between the Trump administration and the FBI over the bureau’s investigative actions during the previous administration. Patel, who started in the director job only days before, said in a statement that “there will be no cover-ups, no missing documents, and no stone left unturned — and anyone from the prior or current Bureau who undermines this will be swiftly pursued. If there are gaps, we will find them. If records have been hidden, we will uncover them.”
This story has been updated with additional comment.
