A senior official in the Department of Justice was caught in a honeytrap scheme bragging about department plans to “redact every Republican” from Jeffrey Epstein’s client list.
Joseph Schnitt, an acting deputy chief in Attorney General Pam Bondi’s DOJ, was recorded on camera divulging details of a planned cover-up regarding the names of Epstein’s high-profile clients.
Schnitt was secretly filmed by a woman he met on Hinge who works for the O’Keefe Media Group, a far-right media organization founded by Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe.
In the video, published on Thursday, Schnitt can be seen telling his date that the department will “redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, Democratic people in those files, and have a very slanted version of it come out.”
Schnitt, seemingly an open book, also told his date that the decision to move Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison went against Board of Prisons policy due to her status as a convicted sex offender, claiming that meant the DOJ was “offering her something to keep her mouth shut.”
Schnitt went on to describe the internal conflict between Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Bongino’s insistence that the Epstein files be released sparked a civil war within MAGA earlier this year.
“Second-in-command [Bongino] at the FBI has been causing problems, because he’s like, ‘No, these [Epstein files] have to be released.’ Internally there’s a lot of conflict,” Schnitt told his date.
He also described his boss Pam Bondi as a “yes person” who “wants whatever Trump wants.” In a statement posted to social media, Schnitt claimed that the comments were “my own personal comments on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done at or via work.”
The DOJ said on X that “The comments in this video have absolutely zero bearing with reality and reflect a total lack of knowledge of the DOJ’s review process,” adding that the DOJ is “committed to transparency and is in compliance with the House Oversight Committee’s request for documents.”
The Trump administration’s failure to release the Epstein files has caused chaos within the Republican Party in recent weeks, with formerly diehard Trump loyal Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene joining fellow Republican representative Thomas Massie and Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna in calling for the files to be released.
In response to the bipartisan resolution from Massie and Khanna, the DOJ published more than 33,000 documents relating to the Epstein case, 97 percent of which were already publicly available.
In addition, Greene and Massie have both offered to read out the names of Epstein’s powerful clients in Congress, making use of the speech or debate clause that gives representatives immunity, and Greene has been petitioning the president to agree to meet with Epstein’s victims.
For his part, Trump has dismissed the campaign to release the Epstein files as being part of a Democrat-led “hoax” designed to distract from what he argues are “the most successful eight months of any president ever.”
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