Good afternoon. This is the Final NOTUS newsletter for February 11, 2026. You can get it in your inbox every day by signing up here — it’s free!
The Latest
We’re not saying it was the ugliest House hearing ever, but Pam Bondi’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee was certainly a contender:
- Bondi apologized to victims of Jeffrey Epstein in the hearing room for the suffering “that monster” caused them. But when Pramila Jayapal asked Bondi to turn around and apologize for the DOJ’s role in the case, Bondi said she wasn’t going to “get in the gutter with these theatrics” and then called Jayapal “unprofessional.”
- Jerry Nadler asked Bondi how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators she’d indicted. Bondi tried to change the subject. When Nadler objected, she said: “I’m going to answer the question the way I want to answer the question,” then told Chair Jim Jordan that she wasn’t going to “get in the gutter with these people.”
- Ranking Member Jamie Raskin jumped in to say he’d previously told Bondi she couldn’t filibuster members. She shot back: “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer.”
- After the hearing, Thomas Massie claimed Bondi’s staff gave her cue cards with insults prepared for her inquisitors, “but she couldn’t memorize them” so she had to “shuffle through them to find the flash-cards-insult that matches the member.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the U.S. added 130,000 jobs in January. That’s way better than analysts predicted, and way better than Trump administration officials foreshadowed earlier this week. A spike in health care jobs offset a sharp decline in federal government jobs.