AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show going back to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday. This is Bondi being questioned by our next guest, Democratic Congresswoman Becca Balint of Vermont.

REP. BECCA BALINT: And we now know that Lutnick went to Epstein’s island in 2012. How was that not a deal-breaker for the president? And why aren’t you asking questions of the commerce secretary about what he saw when he was at the island, which he lied about not ever going to? Why are you not asking these questions? And I see that my time is almost expired, so I will say this.

ATTORNEY GENERAL PAM BONDI: Shame.

REP. BECCA BALINT: Do the right thing, Attorney General. Meet with the survivors. They have been asking for a year. Meet with the survivors. Do the right thing. I yield back.

REP. JIM JORDAN: Gentlelady yields back. The gentleman from South Carolina is recognized for five minutes.

ATTORNEY GENERAL PAM BONDI: May I have 20 seconds of his time?

REP. JIM JORDAN: That’d be up to the gentleman, but…

REP. RUSSELL FRY: Absolutely, Madam Secretary.

ATTORNEY GENERAL PAM BONDI: Thank you. Thank you. I was curious if you, Congresswoman, asked Bill Clinton that. Didn’t hear — didn’t see one tweet, not one! I didn’t see one tweet when Joe Biden was in office about Bill Clinton. Didn’t ask Merrick Garland anything about Epstein, not once, when he was —

REP. BECCA BALINT: Weak sauce. Weak sauce.

ATTORNEY GENERAL PAM BONDI: And also, I want the record to reflect that, you know, with this antisemitic culture right now, she voted against a resolution contempt — condemning —

REP. BECCA BALINT: Oh!

UNIDENTIFIED: She is Jewish, I just want to be clear.

REP. BECCA BALINT: Oh! Oh!

ATTORNEY GENERAL PAM BONDI: — “from the river to the sea” as antisemitic.

REP. JIM JORDAN: The time — time —

REP. BECCA BALINT: Do you want to go there, Attorney General?

REP. JIM JORDAN: Time belongs to the —

REP. BECCA BALINT: Do you want to go there? Are you serious —

REP. JIM JORDAN: Time belongs to the gentleman from South Carolina.

REP. BECCA BALINT: — talking about antisemitism to a woman who —

REP. JIM JORDAN: The lady will —

REP. BECCA BALINT: — lost her grandfather in the Holocaust?

REP. RUSSELL FRY: I reclaim my time. I reclaim my time.

REP. BECCA BALINT: Really? Really?

AMY GOODMAN: After that exchange, Democratic Congresswoman Becca Balint of Vermont left the hearing. She joins us now. This is Democracy Now!

Thank you so much, Congressmember Balint, for being with us. Explain why you walked out on the Attorney General Pam Bondi.

REP. BECCA BALINT: So, I walked out because, well, first of all, my time had expired, and I needed to collect myself, quite honestly. And the thing that I want people to understand is I was there in that hearing really channeling all of what I’ve heard from the survivors in the multiple times that I’ve met with them, and I was just so disgusted that I had ended my remarks by saying, “Do the right thing. Meet with the survivors,” and she continued to make it about other things and other people. And her going after me personally like that was just too much, because the survivors were sitting right there asking for her attention; instead, she chose to accuse me of antisemitism.

And in retrospect, as I’ve had time to think about that with my team, I think she did that because the Department of Justice had been surveilling us, and so she knew that the files that I had looked at were Secretary Lutnick, and I think she was going to try to go after my line of questioning by attacking me as antisemitic because Howard Lutnick is Jewish. And, of course, they hadn’t also done their homework about my own Jewish identity and my background. It was just heartbreaking to watch the attorney general act in this way, especially when survivors have waited, over the course of decades, for justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Maybe she kept raising the issue of the Dow and that you should be happy that the Dow is up because of Commerce Secretary Lutnick, who, just to be clear for people, said his last interaction with Epstein was in 2005, when it came out in these Epstein files that in 2012 he went to his island with his wife and his four children and his nannies and friends to have lunch with Mr. Epstein.

REP. BECCA BALINT: That’s exactly right. And what is so shocking, you know, as we have continued to go through the files, is just the shocking number of rich and powerful men who had no problem hanging out with a convicted pedophile, had no problem hanging out with somebody who was clearly involved in sexual abuse. And that was not — as I said in my testimony, that was not a deal-breaker for the president. It was not a deal-breaker for all of these men who continued to interact with him. And then, ultimately, for the Trump now to have three high-ranking officials in his administration who clearly have ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and the DOJ is not asking any questions about that.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to two other issues, to ICE, but first to what happened this week. In its latest attack against LGBTQ+ people, the Trump administration has removed a Pride flag from the historic Stonewall National Monument, just down the road from us here in New York City, Stonewall becoming the first national monument to the gay rights movement following the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. You’re the first out LGBTQ+ person to represent Vermont in Congress. Your response?

REP. BECCA BALINT: So, look, they’re going after any community that changes their vision and their narrative of a straight, white, Christian nation. They have also removed multiple exhibits from the Smithsonian, and also was talking with a member yesterday about their removal of information about the Tuskegee Airmen. So, this is horrible for my community, but we are not alone in this.

And I think Americans have had enough, quite frankly. I don’t think this is going to be a winning issue for him, because they continue to cleave off from their coalition, that won him the White House — they continue to cleave off all of these different communities that make up the fabric of America. And it’s petty, and it’s mean, and ultimately it’s cruel. And they’re not going to prevail. You’re not going to be able to erase history. And I certainly am not going to let him do that. And I’ve raised the issue of protecting the rights of my community in every hearing that it comes up, and I’m not going to stop doing that.

AMY GOODMAN: I also want to ask you about the case of Pastor Steven Tendo, an asylum seeker from Uganda who arrived in the U.S. in 2018, a resident of your state of Vermont, works as a licensed nursing assistant. Last Wednesday, he was arrested at gunpoint outside the medical facility where he works, and is now in ICE custody in New Hampshire. He fled persecution and torture in his home country, but his asylum case was eventually denied, earlier spent two years in detention at Port Isabel detention center in Los Fresnos, [Texas], while pressing that asylum claim. Your response, what you’re calling for?

REP. BECCA BALINT: So, look, I just want to be clear with your listeners: What the president has created is a paramilitary force to terrorize communities of color in this nation, and also immigrant and refugee communities. And they’re not going after violent people. They are not going after the so-called worst of the worst in terms of violations of our law. What they’re going after — the people they are going after are hard-working members of their communities, people who have legitimate cases, whether it’s an asylum case or — you know, the other thing that we’ve seen, Amy — and I don’t know if you’ve talked about this on the show — we have seen at naturalization services, as people come, in the very last step of the process, they’ve done everything right —

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about Mohsen Mahdawi, right? The Columbia student.

REP. BECCA BALINT: Well, certainly Mohsen Mahdawi, but the other thing is, I have been at naturalization ceremonies in which we were expecting a certain number of people to be naturalized on that day, and the day of, they have told — they are told, “No, you’re not going to get your citizenship today.”

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, but I want to thank you for being with us, Democratic Congressmember Becca Balint of Vermont, vice ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.

A happy birthday to Dante Torrieri!

And I want to again encourage people to come out to our February 23rd Riverside Church 30th anniversary Democracy Now! celebration with Michael Stipe and Wynton Marsalis, Angela Davis and Naomi Klein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha, Hurray for the Riff Raff, the Nobel Peace laureate, as well, Maria Ressa. I’m Amy Goodman. Get our tickets at democracynow.org.