The audience laughed, but Kamala Harris did not. She looked straight into the camera with a solemnity that clashed sharply with the room’s reaction, insisting that the Biden Justice Department was genuinely “independent.” And then she offered her evidence: the long-delayed Jeffrey Epstein files. The response was a mixture of disbelief and incredulity, and for good reason. This is the same Department of Justice that, over the past several years, has become a lightning rod for controversy—raiding political opponents at dawn, pursuing pro-life activists with aggressive zeal, and conducting investigations that many see as politically selective. To present that institution as a paragon of impartiality was a moment that, to some, felt less like an explanation and more like a spectacle.
Harris’s answer did more than stumble; it revealed a deeper, festering unease that has taken root among millions of Americans who already distrust federal power. To hold up the Biden DOJ as a shining example of independence, while parents, activists, and political figures recall raids, prosecutions, and surveillance, is to pretend that recent history simply evaporated. And invoking the Epstein files as proof of this independence only amplified the dissonance. If transparency were genuinely the priority, those files would have been released years ago, when the administration had every opportunity—and every lever of control under Attorney General Garland—to do so. Instead, they waited, letting suspicion fester, and then attempted to recast the delay as virtue and political distance as principle.
Harris’s argument, at its core, is riddled with contradictions. She suggests that the Justice Department under Trump suppressed these documents—but if that were true, why were they not released earlier, when the Biden administration held full authority? The logic collapses under scrutiny, leaving the attempt to portray DOJ actions as principled independence looking more like a calculated narrative spun to protect credibility that has long since eroded. What was meant to reassure the public instead felt like a performance—a last, frantic effort to rewrite the record while acknowledging, however subtly, that trust in Washington’s institutions is perilously thin. In the end, the spectacle was not leadership; it was a mirror reflecting the widening gap between official statements and lived experience, between promises of impartiality and the realities of selective enforcement that Americans cannot forget.
