(File Photo: Source for Photo: (File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – Audrey Strauss, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, points to a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, during a news conference in New York on July 2, 2020. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has signed a bill to compel the Justice Department to make public its case files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a potentially far-reaching development in a yearslong push by survivors of Epstein’s abuse for a public reckoning.
Both the House and Senate passed the bill this week with overwhelming margins after Trump reversed course on his monthslong opposition to the bill and indicated he would sign it. Now that the bill has been signed by the president, there’s a 30-day countdown for the Justice Department to produce what’s commonly known as the Epstein files.
“This bill is a command for the president to be fully transparent, to come fully clean, and to provide full honesty to the American people,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Wednesday.
Schumer added that Democrats were ready to push back if they perceive that the president is doing anything but adhering to “full transparency.”
In a social media post Wednesday as he announced he had signed the bill, Trump wrote, “Democrats have used the ‘Epstein’ issue, which affects them far more than the Republican Party, in order to try and distract from our AMAZING Victories.”
The swift, bipartisan work in Congress this week was a response to the growing public demand that the Epstein files be released, especially as attention focuses on his connections to global leaders including Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, who has already been stripped of his royal title as Prince Andrew over the matter, and many others.
There is plenty of public anticipation about what more the files could reveal. Yet the bill will most likely trigger a rarely seen baring of a sprawling federal investigation, also creating the potential for unintended consequences.
What does the bill do?
The bill compels Attorney General Pam Bondi to release essentially everything the Justice Department has collected over multiple federal investigations into Epstein, as well as his longtime confidante and girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for luring teenage girls for the disgraced financier. Those records total around 100,000 pages, according to a federal judge who has reviewed the case.
It will also compel the Justice Department to produce all its internal communications on Epstein and his associates and his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell as he awaited charges for sexually abusing and trafficking dozens of teenage girls.
The legislation, however, exempts some parts of the case files. The bill’s authors made sure to include that the Justice Department could withhold personally identifiable information of victims, child sexual abuse materials and information deemed by the administration to be classified for national defense or foreign policy.
“We will continue to follow the law with maximum transparency while protecting victims,” Bondi told a news conference Wednesday when asked about releasing the files.
The bill also allows the Justice Department to withhold information that would jeopardize active investigations or prosecutions. That’s created some worry among the bill’s proponents that the department would open active investigations into people named in the Epstein files in order to shield that material from public view.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a longtime Trump loyalist who has had a prominent split with Trump over the bill, said Tuesday that she saw the administration’s compliance with the bill as its “real test.”
“Will the Department of Justice release the files, or will it all remain tied up in investigations?” she asked.
In July, the FBI said in a memo regarding the Epstein investigation that, “we did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” But Bondi last week complied with Trump’s demands and ordered a federal prosecutor to investigate Epstein’s ties to the president’s political foes, including Clinton.
Still, Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who sponsored the bill, said “there’s no way they can have enough investigations to cover” all of the people he believes are implicated in Epstein’s abuse.
“And if they do, then good,” he added.
The bill also requires the Justice Department to produce reports on what materials it withheld, as well as redactions made, within 15 days of the release of the files. It stipulates that officials can’t withhold or redact anything “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
Who could be named?
There’s a widely held expectation that many people could be named in case files for investigations that spanned over a decade — and some concern that just because someone is named, that person would be assumed guilty or complicit.
Epstein was a luminary who kept company with heads of state, influential political figures, academics and billionaires. The release of his emails and messages by a House Oversight Committee investigation last week has already shown his connections with — and private conversations about — Trump and many other high-powered figures.
Yet federal prosecutors follow carefully constructed guidelines about what information they produce publicly and at trial, both to protect victims and to uphold the fairness of the legal system. House Speaker Mike Johnson raised objections to the bill on those grounds this week, arguing that it could reveal unwanted information on victims as well as others who were in contact with investigators.
Still, Johnson did not actually try to make changes to the bill and voted for it on the House floor.
For the bill’s proponents, a public reckoning over the investigation is precisely the point. Some of the survivors of trafficking from Epstein and Maxwell have sought ways to name people they accuse of being complicit or involved, but fear they will face lawsuits from the men they accuse.
Massie said that he wants the FBI to release the reports from its interviews with the victims.
Those reports typically contain unvetted information, but Massie said he is determined to name those who are accused. He and Greene have offered to read the names of those accused on the House floor, which would shield their speech from legal consequences.
“We need names,” Massie said.
