Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna claimed on Monday that the Department of Justice improperly redacted the names and faces of six potential co-conspirators of the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The two lawmakers, who led the congressional charge to compel the DOJ to release every government file related to Epstein, arrived at Two Constitution Square to review less-redacted versions of the files than have been released to the public so far. After their in-person review on Monday, they again accused the DOJ of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“There is no reason in our legislation that allows them to redact the names of those men, as far as I can tell,” Massie told reporters. “It’s a list of 20 individuals … Maxwell and Epstein are on the list, and maybe one or two other people, and everybody else is redacted” in at least one document that has been made public in recent weeks.
Massie claimed the men were “likely incriminated” based on the document’s context, but declined for now to share their names. He said he first wanted to give the DOJ a chance to explain why those names weren’t made public.
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“One is pretty high up in a foreign government,” Massie said.
Khanna chimed in: “One of the others is a pretty prominent individual.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two lawmakers spent Monday afternoon in a secure room in a federal building looking through these files, where no devices were allowed — meaning they had to conduct searches through programs themselves for relevant files, and could only bring out written notes.
Khanna also claimed the files they reviewed still contained black boxes, which he believed resulted from the DOJ receiving already-redacted files from the FBI.
“The point is these six [men associated with Epstein] are just what we found in two hours of a review of the files that aren’t redacted,” Khanna said. “Our bigger concern is that there’s still a lot that’s redacted. Even in what we’re seeing, we’re seeing redacted versions. I thought we were supposed to see the unredacted versions.”
Khanna also said that “it seemed like they blanket-redacted anyone who was a female in my review,” perhaps as part of the DOJ’s effort to shield the identities of Epstein’s victims.
The pair has already been vocal about their dissatisfaction with the DOJ’s redactions in the files. The DOJ released thousands of documents in waves in December, and the department missed a statutory deadline in justifying those redactions. That compounded Khanna and Massie’s frustrations about the DOJ having missed the initial statutory deadline for releasing all of its files on Dec. 19.
Officials have since signaled that the latest drop would be the last, despite admitting that not all the files are publicly available.
Last week, the DOJ also had to remove from public access thousands of files from its most recent 3-million-document dump. Bondi cited “technical or human error” that revealed “victim-identifying information” in a letter to Manhattan federal judges.
Massie said those pulled files were not available for lawmakers to view on Monday, either.
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