A bipartisan group of lawmakers asked Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday to update them this week on the Justice Department’s progress on releasing files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
President Donald Trump signed a law last month directing the Justice Department to release within 30 days files related to its investigation into Epstein — who was arrested in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges and died in federal custody, apparently by suicide. But many Democrats have expressed skepticism that Trump will follow through on releasing the files after the White House spent months trying to prevent the law from passing.
The Justice Department has not responded to questions about how it plans to comply with the new law.
The lawmakers asked Bondi to brief them by Friday on “any new evidence, information or procedural hurdles that could interfere with the Department’s ability to meet” the deadline, which requires the administration to release the files by Dec. 19.
The Justice Department announced last month at Trump’s urging that it would open an investigation into Epstein’s relationships with three Democrats: former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Larry Summers and Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn who is a Democratic donor. Bondi cited “new information” that had come to light after the FBI said in July that its review of the files had turned up no evidence to justify further investigations, but she did not specify what that information was.
The law exempts from release files that would interfere with a current investigation if they were made public.
The lawmakers who signed Wednesday’s letter — Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico) and Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Ro Khanna (D-California) — asked for a briefing “to discuss the full contents of this new information in your possession.”
Democrats said after the law passed that they believed the administration would find excuses to avoid releasing the files.
“They will likely say that releasing information will compromise ongoing investigations — maybe investigations that they will start in order to make that argument,” Merkley told reporters last month. “And how we handle that then is going to require a lot of consultation with the legal experts on how we can compel the release of the information.”
As lawmakers in both parties have clamored for more information about Epstein, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has also sought records from Epstein’s estate and elsewhere that it has made public.
The documents released by the committee have singed Democrats and Republicans alike.
Epstein wrote in a 2019 email that Trump “came to my house many times” during the period in which Epstein was abusing teenage girls but that Trump never participated in the abuse. Revelations of Summers’s close relationship with Epstein have threatened to end his career. And text messages released by the committee revealed that Del. Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic member of Congress from the U.S. Virgin Islands, texted with Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing with Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer.
House Democrats released the latest files Wednesday: new photos and videos of Epstein’s private island that the committee obtained from the Virgin Islands Department of Justice.
The photos were taken the year after Epstein’s death and do not reveal any new details of his activities.
Rep. Robert Garcia (California), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said the committee had also received records from J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank that it planned to review and release in the coming days. He called on the administration to comply with the law Congress passed.
“It’s time for President Trump to release all the files, now,” Garcia said in a statement.
Trump is not the only barrier to making the Epstein files public. The Justice Department asked federal courts in New York and Florida to unseal grand jury testimony in response to the law. But lawyers for Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted on sex-trafficking charges in 2021, said in a court filing that they would oppose unsealing grand jury testimony in her case because she plans to file a petition with a federal court, known as a habeas corpus motion, asking a judge to release her from prison.
“Releasing the grand jury materials from her case, which contain untested and unproven allegations, would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial should Ms. Maxwell’s habeas petition succeed,” the lawyers, David Markus and Melissa Madrigal, wrote Wednesday in a letter to U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer.
Perry Stein and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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