WASHINGTON – Two members of Congress who pushed the federal government to make public its investigations into the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein said they had identified at least six men who were likely incriminated in the well-connected financier’s crimes, but declined to share names.
Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., spent two hours in a Justice Department office on Monday, the first day unredacted files were made available for lawmakers to review. They complained that many of the files they looked at were still redacted, suggesting they had already been censored by the FBI and other federal agencies when the Justice Department collected them.
But Khanna and Massie told reporters after they found a list of men, including a high-ranking member of a foreign government and another prominent individual, who they believe was improperly deleted when the department released millions of records late last month. They added that they want to give Justice Department officials an opportunity to check their work and correct any mistakes, rather than naming the men.
“None of this is meant to be a witch hunt. Just because someone might be in the files doesn’t mean they’re guilty,” Khanna said. “But there are very powerful people who raped these underage girls. It wasn’t just Epstein.”
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to procuring minors for prostitution and then died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on additional federal sex-trafficking charges, sparking conspiracy theories that the government was hiding the identities of powerful figures who had procured underage girls from him. After promising to release the files during his campaign last year, President Donald Trump, a close friend of Epstein’s before they fell out in the early 2000s, returned once in office.
So Khanna and Massie teamed up, going around Trump and Republican congressional leaders to force a vote last fall to release the documents. Their law, passed almost unanimously in November after the president resigned, would have required the Justice Department to release all unclassified records in its possession related to the Epstein investigation within 30 days.
Yet the process was met with public outrage: the Justice Department passed its initial deadline in December, prompting Democratic lawmakers to threaten impeachment. When officials released another 3 million records late last month from multiple federal cases and investigations related to Epstein and his accomplices, improper redactions revealed the names of the victims while protecting the identities of some people who corresponded with Epstein. Millions more documents were withheld because the department said they were duplicates, protected by attorney-client privilege or depicted violence.
A group of survivors of Epstein’s trafficking appeared in an ad broadcast during Sunday’s Super Bowl where they asked for more transparency and told Attorney General Pam Bondi that “it’s time for the truth”.
Khanna – who began building a national profile on a populist promise to go after a “corrupt elite” he called the “Epstein class” – said Monday that it was difficult to determine whether the extensive redactions were in line with the law or not.
The Justice Department also appeared to have ridiculed almost every female name in the files, Massie said, including the sender of an email that thanked Epstein for a “fun night” because “your youngest daughter was a little naughty,” which drew attention online after it was published anonymously. Massie confirmed that it was a woman who wrote it, although he said he could not analyze whether the lawyers released the record to protect the identity of a victim.
“I would like to give the DOJ a chance to say they made a mistake and overreached,” Massie said. “That would probably be the best way to do it.”
However, the fallout continues for prominent individuals who appeared in the files.
Records show that Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick regularly interacted with Epstein for more than a decade before he died, despite Lutnick’s earlier assertion that he had tried to avoid Epstein after 2005. The Rep. Robert Garcia, the Long Beach Democrat who has been investigating Epstein’s ties as a ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, called the House Oversight Committee in recent days. Lutnick to resign, repeatedly accused him of lying to the American public.
Although he himself is not implicated, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also facing a growing political rebellion over his appointment of an ambassador to the United States who had close ties to Epstein.
Former President Bill Clinton, who had a well-documented relationship with Epstein, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify before the House Oversight Committee later this month under the threat of contempt of Congress charges that would put them at risk of imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring with Epstein, appeared virtually before the panel on Monday and invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Her lawyer said she would only answer questions if Trump granted her clemency.
This article originally published in Bay Area Congressman Who Has Seen Unredacted Epstein Files Says At Least 6 Men Are Implicated.