The “overwhelming majority” of documents the Justice Department gave Congress in response to a subpoena for all information from its investigation into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had already been publicly released, the top Democrat on the House’s principal investigative committee said on Saturday.
The Justice Department began sending material on Friday to the House Oversight Committee, which had demanded all records by Aug. 19, providing a total of 33,295 pages.
But Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the panel, said that of the files the committee had received, only 3 percent contained new information. The remaining 97 percent of the pages, he said, had information previously released by the Justice Department, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s office.
Among those files were video from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York from the night of Mr. Epstein’s death; Supreme Court filings from Ghislaine Maxwell, his longtime associate who is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence; a Justice Department inspector general report on Mr. Epstein’s death; and a memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director.
The only new information, Mr. Garcia said, was fewer than 1,000 pages from the Customs and Border Protection’s log of flight locations of Mr. Epstein’s plane from 2000 to 2014, and “forms consistent with re-entry back to the U.S.”
“There is no excuse for incomplete disclosures,” Mr. Garcia said in a statement. “Survivors and the American public deserve the truth.”
A Republican spokeswoman for the committee declined to confirm or deny the contents of the documents, saying that the panel was continuing to review them. In a statement, she said the material was only the first batch of documents from the Justice Department, and that more would be forthcoming.
A spokesman for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The committee has not publicly released the files the Justice Department provided the panel on Friday, though the spokeswoman had said it intended to do so after a thorough review to ensure any victims’ identification and child sexual abuse material were redacted.
The Justice Department on Friday also released transcripts and audio of two days of interviews in late July between Ms. Maxwell and Todd Blanche, the department’s No. 2 official.
The committee’s chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, praised the Justice Department at that time for its speed in delivering “thousands of pages of Epstein-related documents to the Oversight Committee.”
Democrats and a few Republicans on the House Oversight Committee banded together last month to approve a subpoena for the files, forcing Mr. Comer to issue it.
House Republican leaders still appear likely to face a bipartisan effort early next month to force a floor vote on a public release of the files. Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, plan to use a procedural maneuver to bring up their measure, which has bipartisan support, requiring the Justice Department to release its records to the public.
Mr. Khanna, a member of the Oversight Committee, said on Saturday that he planned to press ahead with the measure to force “the full release” of the files.
“Less than 1 percent of files have been released,” Mr. Khanna said. “D.O.J. is stonewalling. The survivors deserve justice and the public deserves transparency.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
The post Justice Dept. Sent Congress Epstein Files That Were Already Public, Democrats Say appeared first on New York Times.
