Key Lawmakers Read The Hidden Epstein Files And Say Pam Bondi Is Covering Them Up | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON — Millions of information launched, a U.S. Cabinet member implicated, a number of European governments thrown into disaster. And the members of Congress who pressured the Justice Department to launch its investigative information on billionaire intercourse predator Jeffrey Epstein stated the federal government continues to be engaged in a cover-up.

“It’s both an exposure in a big way, but it’s also a cover-up,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) informed HuffPost.

Khanna, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) all stated it’s clear President Donald Trump’s administration continues to be unnecessarily and illegally holding again details about Epstein and his relationship with different highly effective figures. Khanna and Massie had been the lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, whereas Raskin led Democrats at a House Judiciary Committee grilling of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, the place she insisted the division had completed its finest.

“More than 500 attorneys and reviewers spent thousands of hours painstakingly reviewing millions of pages to comply with Congress’ law,” Bondi stated. “We’ve released more than 3 million pages, including 180,000 images, all to the public, while doing our very best in the timeframe allotted by the legislation to protect victims. And if you brought us a victim’s name that was inadvertently released, we immediately redacted it.”

Bondi lashed out at lawmakers through the listening to, accusing them of ignoring Epstein’s crimes throughout earlier presidential administrations and claiming a number of lawmakers, together with Massie, endure from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Massie, a frequent goal of Trump’s criticism, informed HuffPost throughout a break within the listening to it’s truly the opposite means round.

“She’s got Massie Derangement Syndrome,” Massie stated. “It’s her thing now. Over at the administration, it’s eating them up.”

When he regarded on the information on the Justice Department, Khanna stated there have been a whole bunch of FBI paperwork recounting interviews with Epstein’s victims that had been improperly redacted. Fixing these redactions, he stated, might reveal the identities of co-conspirators who might probably face prices. (The Justice Department informed Khanna the redaction errors had been the fault of the FBI.)

“It’ll answer people’s questions about who these powerful men were,” Khanna stated.

Khanna and different members had been granted entry to less-redacted materials on 4 computer systems inside a Justice Department workplace. After they used the confidential materials to spotlight improper redactions within the public-facing materials, the division uncensored them — revealing the identities of a number of males who related to Epstein who’d been named as attainable co-conspirators, together with the previous CEO of Victoria’s Secret and a outstanding Emirati businessman.

This weekend, the division faces one other deadline: to justify its redactions to members of Congress in writing. The regulation particularly disallows redactions “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” Whatever the division tells lawmakers will seemingly provoke one other high-profile spherical of questions concerning the authorities’s failure to observe the regulation.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), considered one of three Republican ladies who joined Massie in utilizing a parliamentary maneuver often known as a “discharge petition” to drive House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to permit a vote on the Epstein disclosure invoice, echoed Khanna’s gripe.

“Memos and attachments drafted by the DOJ on potential co-conspirators remain hidden. The excuse? This is how they received the data,” Mace stated Tuesday on social media after reviewing the information in particular person. “The American people deserve every page. Every name. And every truth the government is holding onto.”

As for the way to ensure the Trump administration follows by way of, Khanna advised the strategies they’ve used up to now — together with each court docket filings and fixed media interviews — ought to nonetheless be efficient.

“We can do things in court. We can do things in terms of the continued public pressure. That’s worked, but both we and the survivors may take court action as well,” Khanna stated.

In a sequence of posts on X on Monday and Tuesday, Massie took credit score for forcing the division to unredact questionably censored objects he’d flagged. He advised FBI director Kash Patel lied to Congress when he stated the FBI had no proof that different folks dedicated intercourse trafficking crimes alongside Epstein and his confederate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

The most up-to-date batch of fabric additionally included a Palm Beach police detective’s recollection of talking with Trump in 2006and Trump saying, “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.” The report raises recent doubts about Trump’s previous declare he had “no idea” what kind of legal mischief his former good friend had been as much as, to not point out the president’s account of how his friendship with Epstein ended.

Last 12 months, amid mounting public stress to launch the Epstein materials, the White House claimed Trump severed ties with Epstein as a result of he was a “creep.” The president stated it was as a result of Epstein had poached employees from his Mar-a-Lago membership in Palm Beach, Florida. The alleged poaching occurred round 2000; the earliest report that Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago was in 2007, after his legal conduct turned public information.

Another doc within the new batch — one which was improperly redacted — makes the Trump-Epstein timeline much more complicated. Raskin, the highest Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was one of many first to view the Justice Department’s less-redacted materials. He found the division had improperly censored an e mail from Epstein to Maxwell that contained a lawyer’s abstract of their dialog with Trump’s attorneys round 2009. Raskin informed HuffPost he had seen the redacted model of the e-mail within the public disclosures, then noticed the unredacted model on the DOJ’s laptop.

“It recorded [Trump] in the interview as saying Epstein was not a member at Mar-a-Lago, but he was a guest and we never sent him away,” Raskin stated.

It wasn’t clear to Raskin why the fabric was redacted, besides he was fairly positive it wasn’t completed for a great cause.

“It’s certainly not within the terms of the federal law, which is just to redact to protect the victims in their privacy,” Raskin stated.