House Speaker Mike Johnson offered up an extremely rare rebuke of the Trump administration over its tracking of lawmakers’ searches of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The revelation that the Justice Department was monitoring which unredacted files lawmakers were looking up was inadvertently made by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
During her combative appearance before House members on Tuesday, a list of one lawmaker’s search history was spotted in Bondi’s binder of prepared information.
The printout showed which documents Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal had pulled up during her visit to see the Justice Department’s unredacted files under the title “Jayapal Pramila Search History.”
The revelation sparked furious backlash among Democrats, but even Johnson, who is almost always a fierce defender of the administration, admonished it.
“I think members should obviously have the right to peruse those at their own speed and with their own discretion. I don’t think it’s appropriate for anybody to be tracking that,” Johnson, 54, said Thursday.
He told CNN’s Manu Raju that he would “echo that to anybody involved with the DOJ.”
Johnson’s rebuke came one day after he declined to comment on the spying allegation, claiming he didn’t know anything about it.
Jayapal slammed the Justice Department keeping tabs on her search history on Wednesday afternoon on X where she shared a photo showing Bondi’s printed list with her name from the explosive hearing.
“It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files,” Jayapal, 60, wrote on X.