The House passed a bill directing the Justice Department to release the Epstein files passed overwhelmingly in November, but most Republicans don’t seem overly concerned the department is violating the law.
Fifty-four days past the congressionally mandated deadline to produce all the unclassified files, the Department of Justice handed over roughly three million pages of materials. But it is still sitting on more than three million more pages related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The lawmakers who led the charge for the release pointed out that many documents publicly released so far include extensive redactions, which are limited by the law to protect sex trafficking victims.
This week, bipartisan members of Congress who reviewed some unredacted documents said the DOJ had wrongly obscured the names of potential Epstein coconspirators.
The latest documents reveal that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick visited Epstein’s notorious Little Saint James island where the disgraced financier trafficked underage girls. The visit came after the time period when Lutnick previously said he cut off contact with Epstein.
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Democrats called the unspooling scandal a multinational “coverup.” Rep. Tom McClintock, a senior Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, had a different description of the developments: “Epstein hysteria.”
“Frankly, I think our country is facing far greater problems, and I have not devoted much time to following the Epstein hysteria,” Rep. Tom McClintock, a senior Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, told NOTUS Wednesday.
McClintock is not alone. Although a few insurgent Republicans, led by Rep. Thomas Massie, have demanded transparency and accountability for those implicated in the Epstein documents, many more Republicans directly responsible for oversight of the DOJ have shrugged off the latest developments.
“Mistakes are going to happen,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew, another Judiciary Republican, told NOTUS about the redactions that in some cases DOJ admits were improper to the Epstein files. “I think there’s some corrections that may need to be made, and I think they will, and I don’t find fault.”
Asked whether Lutnick visiting Epstein’s island in 2012 is cause for concern, Van Drew said: “Unless there’s something more specific at this point, it does not.”
Questions of Epstein accountability took center stage on Capitol Hill Wednesday when Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. Democrats peppered Bondi with questions about her department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandates disclosure of Epstein-related files. After many GOP members kept mum about the legislation for months, all but one House Republican ultimately backed the bill in November, including House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan.
But Jordan did not focus on the legislation and the DOJ’s compliance during the Bondi hearing. Instead, he centered his opening remarks on his opposition to sanctuary cities amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and his praise of Bondi’s first year in office.
Those comments stood in stark contrast to Massie and Democrats on the panel hammering Bondi for her department’s handling of the release of the Epstein documents. Massie reviewed some of the unredacted files Monday and said he and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna identified six men “likely incriminated” whose names have been redacted.
“Literally, the worst thing you could do to the survivors, you did,” Massie said to Bondi during the hearing.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the panel’s top Democrat, spent hours reviewing unredacted files at a DOJ office Monday. He spent the entirety of his opening statement Wednesday criticizing DOJ’s Epstein document release, focusing on the department allegedly failing to redact certain survivors’ names and personal information.
“They should be the ones looking for the conspiracies,” Raskin told reporters of the DOJ after the hearing. “They should be the ones looking for the crimes, but they have kicked the can down the road, and so we are going to have to do that.”
On Wednesday, most Republicans on the committee did not appear to share those concerns.
“Everyone acknowledges there’s been a lot of documents, a lot of transparency, and it’s a very delicate task,”Judiciary panel member Rep. Kevin Kiley told NOTUS.
Asked if anything he has seen about Trump administration officials in the documents caused him concern, a senior panelist Rep. Andy Biggs had a brief answer: “Nothing that I’ve seen so far.”
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