Senate Democrats say they will hold Attorney General Pam Bondi “accountable” for her leadership of the Department of Justice and for what they view as her contemptuous attitude toward them, which they say was evident during a combative Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week.

Democratic senators acknowledge they don’t have much leverage over the Trump Justice Department now, but they’re laying the groundwork for a war with the administration if they flip the Senate or House in the 2026 midterm election.

“I was literally just talking to some of my Democratic House colleagues on Judiciary about the unprecedented nature of that kind of slandering obstruction of oversight,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Bondi’s personal attacks on Democratic senators during Tuesday’s hearing.

Schiff, a first-term senator, said his Senate colleagues told him that Bondi’s political attacks on senators during an oversight hearing “was really unprecedented.”

He said Democrats would try their best to push back on Bondi’s refusal to answer their questions in the coming days and weeks, but he acknowledged they would need help from Republicans to get anywhere.

This has Democrats looking ahead to the battles to come with the administration if they can win back either chamber in 2026, something they are feeling more optimistic about doing.

“We have to hope that we can flip one or both houses and then we’ll do some serious oversight. The administration ought to recognize they’re only going to defer accountability for so long,” Schiff said.

For Schiff, the battle is personal to some extent because President Trump has publicly called on Bondi to prosecute the California senator, who served as a House prosecutor during Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020.

Schiff on Wednesday stopped short of discussing whether Democrats would explore impeachment proceedings against Bondi,........

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