House Democrats on Friday released new images from the estate of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that highlight his ties to celebrities, financiers and other powerful men, including President Trump and former President Bill Clinton.
The 19 photos, selected by Democrats on the Oversight Committee from a trove of 95,000 images in Mr. Epstein’s email account and on one of his laptops, offer little new detail to illuminate Mr. Epstein’s well-documented relationship with prominent men in politics, business, media and academia. It was not clear whether Mr. Epstein, who is not in all of the images, took some of the photos or how they ended up in his possession.
Democrats provided no context for the images they released, including any email messages that might have accompanied them. They also redacted faces of women in some of the photos, which they said was an effort to protect the identities of any potential victims of Mr. Epstein.
But Democrats argued that it was appropriate to release the photographs ahead of a deadline next Friday for the Justice Department to make public, with significant exceptions, its investigative files about the Epstein case.
Mr. Epstein died by suicide in a federal prison in 2019 while in custody on sex-trafficking charges. Many of the wealthy and famous men who were once in his orbit have faced questions for years about what they knew about his lurid lifestyle and the accusations that he was trafficking girls as young as 14 for sex.
“These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world,” said Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, in a statement. “We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, now.”
A law passed by Congress last month requires the Justice Department to release its files on Mr. Epstein by Dec. 19, though the measure includes several exceptions that could delay or block full disclosure.
The photographs released on Friday were part of a separate trove of information that Mr. Epstein’s estate has turned over to Congress in recent months in response to a subpoena from the oversight panel.
Republicans on the Oversight Committee accused Democrats of selectively releasing the images to fuel a misleading and debunked narrative about Mr. Epstein’s ties to the president. A spokeswoman for the Republicans, who insisted on anonymity because she did not want her name associated with Mr. Epstein, said that nothing in the documents received by the panel showed any wrongdoing.
Most of the images released by Democrats document ties that had already been known. As well as Mr. Clinton and Mr. Trump, they show Mr. Epstein with Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard University economist and former Treasury secretary; the film director Woody Allen; the tech billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates; and Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing media personality who has said that he videotaped interviews in Mr. Epstein’s mansion in 2019.
Mr. Bannon and representatives for the White House, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Gates, Mr. Summers and Mr. Allen did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The selection of images appeared intended at least in part to insulate Democrats from Republicans’ criticism that they have been overly focused on Mr. Epstein’s links to Mr. Trump while ignoring his ties to figures on the left.
The series of photos does include three images of Mr. Trump. One, which was previously public, shows Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump together at a Victoria’s Secret party in New York City in 1997. Two others depict Mr. Trump with unidentified women, and their locations are not clear. One of them, in black-and-white, shows Mr. Trump standing with six unidentified women wearing plastic leis.
Mr. Trump has acknowledged that he and Mr. Epstein were once friendly, and both men lived in Manhattan and in Palm Beach, Fla. But he has repeatedly and emphatically denied any knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation, and the two men had a falling-out sometime in the mid-2000s.
Some of the other photos show sex toys. One depicts a satirical “Trump condom” that also appears to be part of the Smithsonian Institution’s collection.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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