(AFP) – Congressional Democrats accused US Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday of engaging in a “cover-up” of the Jeffrey Epstein files and turning the Department of Justice into an “instrument of revenge” for President Donald Trump. Bondi, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, defended the DOJ’s handling of the records about the convicted sex offender at a fiery hearing attended by several Epstein victims.
Jamie Raskin, the panel’s ranking Democrat, criticized the slow release of the Epstein investigative files and the redactions made to the documents. “You’re running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Department of Justice,” Raskin said. “You’ve been ordered by subpoena and by Congress to turn over six million documents, photographs and videos in the Epstein files, but you’ve turned over only three million.”
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress in November, compelled the DOJ to release all documents in its possession related to the disgraced financier within 30 days. It required redaction of names or other personally identifiable information about Epstein’s victims, who numbered more than 1,000 according to the FBI. But the powerful figures — including politicians like Trump and multiple business tycoons — who were friendly with Epstein could not be shielded, the law states. No records can be “withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary,” it says.
Raskin said the names of Epstein’s “abusers, enablers, accomplices and co-conspirators” have nevertheless been redacted, “apparently to spare them embarrassment and disgrace.” “Even worse, you shockingly failed to redact many of the victims’ names,” he added. Bondi, a close Trump ally, said hundreds of attorneys spent thousands of hours painstakingly reviewing millions of pages to comply with the law. “If any man’s name was redacted that should not have been, we will, of course, unredact it,” the attorney general said. “If a victim’s name was unredacted, please bring it to us and we will redact it.”
“We were given 30 days to review and redact and unredact millions of pages of documents,” she said. “Our error rate is very low.”
Raskin and other Democratic lawmakers condemned the prosecutions brought by the DOJ against Trump’s political foes such as former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. “You’ve turned the people’s Department of Justice into Trump’s instrument of revenge,” he said. “Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza and you deliver every time he tells you to.” House Democrat Jerry Nadler said the department under Bondi has “engaged in a relentless pursuit of Donald Trump’s perceived enemies.”
Epstein, who had ties to top business executives, politicians, celebrities, and academics, was found dead in his New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking minor girls. His death was ruled a suicide. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, is the only person behind bars in connection with Epstein. She was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking underage girls and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing regarding Epstein but he fought for months to prevent the release of the files about his one-time friend. A rebellion among Republicans eventually forced the president to sign off on the law mandating the release of all the records. The move reflected intense political pressure to address what many Americans, including Trump’s own supporters, have long suspected to be a cover-up to protect rich and powerful men in Epstein’s orbit.
Trump’s repeated denials of any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes have come under scrutiny due to a 2019 FBI interview -– contained in the Epstein files — with Palm Beach’s then-police chief Michael Reiter. Reiter told the FBI that Trump had called him in 2006 –- when the sex charges against Epstein became public — to say: “Thank goodness you’re stopping him; everyone has known he’s been doing this.”
– Chris Lefkow
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