Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
The congressmen behind the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Jan. 8 asked a federal judge to appoint a “special master and/or independent monitor” to ensure that the Trump administration actually releases the documents from the trafficking case against deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as required by the new law.
Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) led the monthslong congressional effort to pass the legislation, which Trump—a former friend of Epstein who’s repeatedly mentioned in the files—signed in November. Since then, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has published some heavily redacted materials but blown the Dec. 19 deadline to release everything, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (1/8).
“We have offered for six months to meet with the Justice Department to help them get the right documents out, and we’re now going to be intervening with the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to ask those judges to appoint a special master and ensure that all the documents are released,” Khanna told NPR.
Khanna and Massie did so with a letter to Judge Paul Engelmayer, writing to the appointee of former President Barack Obama that “we have urgent and grave concerns about DOJ’s failure to comply with the act as well as the department’s violations of this court’s order.”
As MS NOW—which initially reported on the letter—explained, “Engelmayer oversees the case involving Ghislaine Maxwell, and last month, the Justice Department obtained Engelmayer’s permission to release grand jury materials and other evidence provided to Maxwell in discovery that were redacted or sealed per a court order.”
On Dec. 24, DOJ announced that it had received over a million more documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and SDNY “to review them for release, in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, existing statutes, and judicial orders.” The department added then that “due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks.”
Khanna and Massie noted in their letter that the DOJ’s most recent court filing Jan. 5 states the department has only produced “approximately 12,285 documents (compromising approximately 125,575 pages)” and there is still “more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the act in various phases of review.”
As the lawmakers pointed out: “Other reports suggest that the DOJ may be reviewing more than 5 million pages. Because these figures are self-reported and internally inconsistent with prior representations, there is reasonable suspicion that the DOJ has overstated the scope of responsive materials, thereby portraying compliance as unmanageable and effectively delaying disclosure.”
