Attorney General Pam Bondi will testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday in her first appearance before Congress since the Justice Department said it had released all of the documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
The department’s handling of the documents has drawn harsh criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and from survivors of Epstein’s sprawling sex trafficking enterprise.
The department missed by more than a month a congressionally mandated deadline of Dec. 19 to release the files in full, which Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche attributed to careful redaction protocol to protect victims’ identities. But the Jan. 30 release of more than 3 million pages of Epstein documents — which Blanche said concluded the department’s release obligations — did not conceal the identities of numerous survivors.
“The redactions and disclosures in this release are reckless and dangerous,” a cohort of survivors wrote in a letter to Bondi on Thursday evening. “This places survivors in jeopardy and sends a chilling message to others and confirms many’s worst fears: reporting abuse will not protect you, it will only expose you.”
The survivors laid out 15 questions for members of the House Judiciary Committee to ask Bondi during the hearing. So far, the documents appeared to exclude much-anticipated information about Epstein’s co-conspirators, which critics said violated the stipulations laid out in the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law passed by Congress in November to compel the department to release the files. Lawmakers have alleged that the department is protecting powerful people and President Donald Trump, whose name appears many times in the documents. On the House floor on Tuesday, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a co-sponsor of the transparency act, read the names of six powerful individuals whose names he said had been unlawfully redacted from the files. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the Republican co-sponsor of the act, echoed Khanna’s frustration after members of Congress viewed some of the unredacted files in a private DOJ reading room, which failed to assuage his concerns.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
