The United States (U.S.) The Congress Oversight Committee published on Tuesday thousands of pages of documents related to financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender, from Department of Justice files. The publication comes after months of controversy over Donald Trump’s administration, which refused to release additional documents in this case. Epstein committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial for sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and he allegedly abused hundreds of girls.
Among the 33.000 pages are court filings related to Epstein and his former partner and associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as materials such as footage from police searches and interviews. Most of the information in the documents was already publicly known.
The release of the documents came as Congress reconvened, and Democratic and Republican representatives planned to hold press conferences demanding greater transparency from the administration.
Donald Trump, a longtime friend of Epstein, has in recent weeks tried to avoid the topic. Earlier this year, he sued the Wall Street Journal over reporting on his relationship with Epstein, claiming that the scandal was a “fake story.” The White House called on Republican representatives not to support a petition that would force the release of all documents on Epstein.
Committee chairman James Comer, a Republican, stated that the petition was unnecessary because the committee had already issued a subpoena for the documents. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called the petition “unnecessary” given the release of the documents.
Most of the published documents had been publicly available, including files from the 2005 investigation. Among them is a transcript of a police interview with Epstein’s employee, who stated that there were “many girls who were very, very young” in his Florida home, but he could not confirm whether they were underage.
The release of the documents did not ease the controversy. Robert Garcia, the top Democratic member of the oversight committee, criticized the Republicans for publishing material that, as he said, was mostly already public. “The 33.000 pages of documents about Epstein that James Comer decided to ‘publish’ were already mostly public information. American citizens – don’t let this deceive you,” Garcia said in a statement.
