If you can’t beat them, join them. President Donald Trump took credit Wednesday night for getting the Jeffrey Epstein files released by signing a bill he spent four months trying to kill. The whole sordid exercise is a testament to the collapse of political trust, and no one comes out looking good.
The president could have ordered the Justice Department to release the files months ago. Instead, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) kept the House out of session for more than six weeks and refused to swear in a Democrat who had won a special election to delay the discharge petition that forced a vote on the measure.
Trump flipped late Sunday after realizing he couldn’t stop the bill, allowing it to pass the House 427 to 1 and clear the Senate by unanimous consent. The president’s signature starts a 30-day clock for Attorney General Pam Bondi to release unclassified documents from the federal investigations into Epstein. The bill has loopholes big enough for Bondi to drive a Mack Truck through, so it’s unclear how much information will actually emerge.
The lone congressional objector, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana), has a point when he says this indiscriminate release “abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America” and could “result in innocent people being hurt.”
After all, the purpose of criminal investigations is to determine whether people are guilty of crimes. The Justice Department exists to prosecute those crimes. It does not exist to satisfy public curiosity. That’s a job for Congress and journalists. When prosecutors leak investigative information about people who haven’t been charged with a crime, that is normally considered a breach.
Yet here the Justice Department, by popular demand, is being directed to open its investigative books and publish a trove of information related to any “entities” with “known or alleged ties” to Epstein. That could include private information obtained in search warrants that is not incriminating.
It’s not as if the Justice Department’s information about Epstein is sitting around unexamined. Five years ago, the Office of Professional Responsibility released the results of its extensive investigation into how Epstein secured a lenient plea deal in Florida in 2008. The 348-page document said the deal reflected “poor judgment.” It also noted that the line prosecutor in charge of child exploitation cases at the time said that none of the victims they spoke with “ever talked about any other men being involved in abusing them.” This year, the FBI again trawled its Epstein documents and found no “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Federal prosecutors have the power, with a judge’s signoff, to seize almost anyone’s records. That information can become public if it is evidence in a criminal case. It shouldn’t solely because there is political clamoring to view it.
That norm prevents the Justice Department from becoming a roving political instrument. Of course, the norm of law-enforcement secrecy works best when people trust law enforcement. The criminal-legal system failed in Epstein’s case to do justice in the first instance, then failed again by allowing him to die in jail in 2019 before he could go on trial. The apparent extent of Epstein’s abuse and connections to the rich and powerful are fodder for conspiracy theories.
People in Trump’s orbit indulged Epstein conspiracies for political gain before they blew up in their faces. Now Democrats are indulging them because they think Trump himself might be tainted, even as the president vigorously denies any wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s criminal conduct. Trump says the two had a falling out before the financier was charged with any crime.
The mistrust is now so widespread that opposing disclosure was futile. Higgins had no hope of stopping the political stampede, but don’t expect the coming disclosures to refute the conspiracy theories.
After all, the measure Trump signed Wednesday contains an exception for information that could interfere with “an active federal investigation.” Trump ordered up just such an investigation last Friday — contradicting his own Justice Department’s statement that the case was closed. Bondi claimed Wednesday that she received new information but declined to provide details. The bill also does not waive grand jury secrecy rules and allows the Justice Department to withhold material that “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
In announcing on social media that he signed the law, Trump showed his intention to keep leveraging Epstein’s crimes against Democrats. The president said Epstein was “a lifelong Democrat,” noted that it was the Trump Justice Department that indicted him in 2019 and accused Democrats of using the files to “distract” from his achievements.
Now that the law has passed so overwhelmingly, it is essential for the government to promptly comply. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) is right that it would be a “mistake” if the Trump administration plays games. For example, it would be scandalous if the Justice Department tries to use the privacy exemption to withhold information about Republicans while putting out similar information about Democrats.
Politicians claim to want to restore public trust in institutions, but often they’re merely exploiting the loss of trust for their own gain. The result in this instance was a stampede for “transparency” that could surface some information in the public interest while also distorting the Justice Department’s role. Don’t expect it to be the last.
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