By Jack Phillips
Contributing Writer
A top House Republican said Monday that the Department of Justice has agreed to hand over documents from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation.
“There are many records in DOJ’s custody, and it will take the department time to produce all the records and ensure that the identification of victims and any child sexual abuse material are redacted,” Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the head of the House Oversight Committee, said in a Monday night statement. “I appreciate the Trump Administration’s commitment to transparency and efforts to provide the American people with information about this matter.”
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. Comer did not provide more details about when those documents might be released or what materials could be involved.
Earlier this month, Comer sent a subpoena to the DOJ for the Epstein-related records and also issued deposition subpoenas to top-level former officials in the Bush, Clinton, Obama, and Trump administrations “for testimony related to horrific crimes perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein,” coming after the Oversight panel approved motions to subpoena the testimony and those records.
Epstein was found dead in his New York jail cell weeks after his 2019 arrest in what investigators ruled a suicide. His former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted in 2021 of helping to lure teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviewed Maxwell at a Florida courthouse over two days last month, and the Justice Department has also sought to unseal grand jury transcripts in the Epstein and Maxwell cases.
Comer noted to reporters that former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr had spoken with lawmakers on Monday.
“What Attorney General Barr testified in there was that he never had conversations with President [Donald] Trump pertaining to a client list, he didn’t know anything about a client list,” Comer told reporters. “He said that he had never seen anything that would implicate President Trump in any of this.”
Last month, DOJ and FBI officials said there was no evidence that Epstein kept a “client list” or engaged in a blackmail scheme, and they said that his death in 2019 was due to suicide. Several members of Congress have attempted to pass resolutions to have the federal government release any files related to Epstein.
More than a week ago, meanwhile, the Justice Department said it would move to unseal exhibits related to both the Epstein and Maxwell investigations. The agency told two federal judges in New York that it wants grand jury exhibits in those cases to be unsealed, with redactions to protect the victims’ identities.
“As there are parties whose names appear in the grand jury exhibits but did not appear in the grand jury transcripts, the government is undertaking to notify such parties to the extent their names appear in grand jury exhibits that were not publicly admitted at the Maxwell trial (and they were not already notified in connection with the request to unseal the grand jury transcripts),” the Justice Department’s attorneys wrote.
But last week, a federal judge denied the DOJ’s request for the grand jury materials, saying that the government failed to meet exceptions applied in past rulings that allowed public disclosure of grand jury materials.
“Granting the government’s motion would bloat the ‘special circumstances’ doctrine, which to date has warranted disclosure in only a tiny number of cases, all involving unique testimony by firsthand witnesses to events of obvious public or historical moment,” Judge Paul Engelmayer said in his opinion.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
