Dick Durbin is leading the Senate Judiciary Committee in an effort to receive more transparency regarding the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, particularly an order from Attorney General Pam Bondi for FBI agents to “flag” any mention they made of President Trump.
In a letter addressed to Bondi on Friday, Durbin wrote: “According to information my office received, you then pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division (IMD), including the Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), which handles all requests submitted by the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act, on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”
“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” he added.
There was likely something for those agents to flag, given Trump’s well-documented relationship with the defamed sex trafficker. There’s the 2002 New York magazine quote where Trump referred to Epstein, his friend of “15 years,” as a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.” And there was the recent Wall Street Journal report that showed Trump writing a strange birthday message to Epstein in 2006, with the closing line “may every day be another wonderful secret.”
But what else was flagged under Bondi’s watch, and what happened to it? Durbin’s report asks just that:
Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?
1. Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.
2. What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?
Trump’s rollout of the Epstein files has been so disorderly that it has Democrats and the most hardcore MAGA loyalists asking the exact same question: What is the truth about Epstein?
The due date for Durbin and the committee’s request is August 1. Trump and Bondi have yet to comment.
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