US President Donald Trump with Attorney-General Pam Bondi at the White House last month. Photo / Matt McClain, The Washington Post
For the past week, official Washington has talked constantly about the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, except for the agency that has custody of the Epstein files.
The United States Justice Department has been silent.
Yesterday, the House and Senate agreed to pass a bill calling on Attorney-General Pam Bondi to release all unclassified information and files related to the sprawling sex-trafficking investigation into the one-time powerful financier.
The Justice Department so far has continued to say little about how it would respond to that demand. There are many reasons to doubt that a bulk release of the files is imminent.
Today, Bondi broke the official silence, but only slightly.
At a news conference on an unrelated issue, she parried repeated questions about the Epstein files, saying: “We will continue to follow the law with maximum transparency while protecting victims”.
If US President Donald Trump wanted Bondi to release all of the Epstein files, he could have ordered her to do so at any point in the past six months. He didn’t.
Earlier this week when Trump did an about-face and said House Republicans should vote in favour of releasing the Epstein files, he notably did not say he favoured releasing them.
Instead, he said in a social media post that the House “can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!”
What Congress is “legally entitled to” is a more complicated question than the rhetoric from Capitol Hill might imply.
The legislation that Congress agreed to pass gives the department a few exceptions under which it can refuse to release material.
Among them: If release “would jeopardise an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution”.
Last week, Trump ordered Bondi to launch a new federal investigation related to Epstein - this one aimed at his ties to several prominent Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, mega-donor Reid Hoffman and former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers. Bondi said the top federal prosecutor in New York City would take on the task.
Bondi began that investigation more than four months after the department said it would not be releasing the Epstein files and that the files contained no information that would lead officials to investigate anyone else.
Bondi said today she had received new information that led her to now investigate people. She did not provide any details about that information.
“There is new information, additional information and, again, we will continue to follow the law and investigate any leads,” Bondi said.
That new investigation could become a reason for the department to block release of many files. Bondi and her deputies have previously said they cannot release information about active investigations.
Other information could be covered by grand jury secrecy rules. The Bill Congress agreed to pass does not explicitly waive those.
The Justice Department has also said many of the files cannot be released because they contain sensitive victim information and pornographic material.
The legislation contains another exception allowing the department to withhold material that “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” or “depicts or contains child sexual abuse”.
“Of course we are going to protect victims,” Deputy Attorney-General Todd Blanche said at the news conference alongside Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. “And the law as written allows us to do that.”
There would not be much recourse for Congress if the department refused to hand over the files since the Bill does not have any enforcement teeth.
If the House decided to issue a subpoena demanding the materials, and the Justice Department refused, the chamber’s leaders could refer officials for criminal prosecution.
But it would fall to Bondi to decide whether to prosecute herself or her deputies, rendering that threat potentially empty.
Yesterday some Republican lawmakers said they were confident that given the legislation, the administration would release the files.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said he hoped the vote in the House was so overwhelming that it would persuade the Administration not to block the release of the files.
“I think it’d be a mistake,” Paul said. “If they really try to play games and obscure some of that, I think it’ll really backfire on them.”
Some Democrats were more pessimistic. Senator Peter Welch of Vermont said he would not be surprised if Bondi refused to release documents because of the investigation she announced last week.
“It would be naive of any of us to think that Trump has really had a conversion,” Welch said, referring to the President’s call for House Republicans to vote for the Bill after months of trying to block it. “He does not want the information out.”
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