Lawmakers are threatening to take action against the Trump Administration for only partially releasing government files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein despite a new law requiring it to make all such materials public by last Friday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on Monday that he is introducing a resolution directing the Senate to initiate legal action against the Justice Department “for its blatant disregard of the law in its refusal to release the complete Epstein files.”
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“The law Congress passed is crystal clear: release the Epstein files in full so Americans can see the truth. Instead, the Trump Department of Justice dumped redactions and withheld the evidence—that breaks the law,” Schumer said in a press release. He called the move a “blatant cover-up,” accusing Justice Department officials of “shielding [President] Donald Trump from accountability.”
Schumer’s announcement comes after two other lawmakers—Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky—said over the weekend that they were discussing pursuing contempt findings against Attorney General Pam Bondi for the incomplete release. Khanna and Massie co-authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last month that gave the Justice Department 30 days to make public a wide collection of unclassified documents related to Epstein, his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, and other people connected to their cases. The law allows the department to redact some information in certain situations, such as to protect victims’ identities and to adhere to the rules of grand jury secrecy.
“The quickest way, and I think most expeditious way, to get justice for these victims is to bring inherent contempt against Pam Bondi,” Massie said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which aired on Sunday. “Ro Khanna and I are talking about and drafting that right now.”
The resolution, Khanna told The Washington Post, would also include a provision that would permit a congressional committee to evaluate any redactions to the files to ensure that there is a valid reason for the redaction.
The Justice Department began releasing the files in the Epstein case on Friday, the deadline imposed by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Before the release, the Trump Administration warned earlier that day that it wouldn’t be releasing all the files—which is required by the law—because of the large scale of the redactions it said were needed to protect victims’ identities.
“What we’re doing is we are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story to the extent it needs to be protected is completely protected,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News on Friday. He added that more documents are expected to be made public over the coming weeks.
Victims of Epstein and lawmakers quickly criticized the department for releasing incomplete and heavily redacted documents that included no significant new details about Epstein’s crimes or the attempts to investigate him.
“For survivors, this deadline was not symbolic for us but was a real opportunity to see whether transparency would finally outweigh the protection of powerful interests, after decades of reporting this abuse,” Liz Stein, an Epstein survivor and anti-trafficking advocate, said in a statement. “The DOJ’s partial, staggered release—largely repeating already public information, lacking context, and extending beyond the statutory deadline—violates federal law and risks shielding the individuals and institutions who perpetrated and enabled this abuse, falling far short of the transparency intended by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”
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