Pam Bondi Announces a Ghost Investigation

Let’s read her statement on “Russiagate” carefully....

There is no investigation.

...of course, if you’re Pam Bondi and the Jeffrey Epstein case is nipping at your heels and you’re desperate to change the subject, and the president whom you serve has just gone bananas at the DNI’s supposed revelations about Russia in 2016 and has just declared his predecessor guilty of treason, and it is now your job to prosecute a matter for which there is exactly zero evidence. In that case, you might have to announce that the Justice Department is looking at the matter.

You might feel a great deal of pressure to announce an investigation, and you might—when told that there really is nothing to investigate here, that the inspector general looked at it all, that John Durham looked at it all, that the statutes of limitations have long ago run, and that there isn’t the remotest whiff of wrongdoing on the part of Obama or intelligence leadership anyway—decide to announce an investigation nonetheless.

And then you might have your staff release a statement that gets as close to announcing a federal criminal investigation as humanly possible without actually saying more than that the Justice Department will, in fact, read the DNI’s material. You might, in fact, put together a statement designed to make people think you have announced an investigation, even though you have, in fact, done nothing of the kind.