WASHINGTON, D.C.— More than 33,000 pages of information about Jeffrey Epstein, a disgraced businessman and convicted sex offender, have been made public by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) gave the materials to the public using a Google Drive link in response to a subpoena.
The committee’s press release says that the DOJ is still making records and is blacking out information to safeguard the names of victims and any child sexual abuse material. The release has a lot of different things in it, such as old court documents, body camera footage from police searches, police interviews, and flight data from Epstein’s private plane. But early examinations from Democratic legislators on the committee show that most of the documents, up to 97%, had previously been made public through court battles or requests for public records. According to these sources, the new information primarily consists of a few flight logs from Customs and Border Protection.
This document release comes only days after it was made public that Justice Department investigators had spoken with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former accomplice who is now in prison. Maxwell allegedly called President Donald Trump “a gentleman in all respects” during the two days of interviews and said she never saw him do anything sexually wrong. She told the police that Epstein or anybody else had never suggested that Trump had done anything wrong.
Maxwell’s statements are very different from the testimony given during her trial in 2021, when four women talked about how Epstein recruited and abused them. She was found guilty and given a 20-year prison sentence for helping him with his sex trafficking activities. Maxwell was moved from a low-security Florida facility to a prison camp in Texas shortly after her interview with the DOJ. The Bureau of Prisons has not publicly stated why this happened.
Lawmakers and the Trump administration have disagreed about the release of the files. The president had said he would make more information available, but many people, even some of his own supporters, have criticized his administration for not releasing data. Some others are skeptical of the Oversight Committee’s publication, saying it doesn’t include all the facts and is mostly a political effort.