Key Lawmakers Read The Hidden Epstein Files And Say Pam Bondi Is Covering Them Up

WASHINGTON — Millions of files released, a U.S. Cabinet member implicated, multiple European governments thrown into crisis. And the members of Congress who forced the Justice Department to release its investigative files on billionaire sex predator Jeffrey Epstein said the government is still engaged in a cover-up.

“It’s both an exposure in a big way, but it’s also a cover-up,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told HuffPost.

Khanna, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) all said it’s clear President Donald Trump’s administration is still unnecessarily and illegally holding back information about Epstein and his relationship with other powerful figures. Khanna and Massie were the lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, while Raskin led Democrats at a House Judiciary Committee grilling of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, where she insisted the department had done its best.

“More than 500 attorneys and reviewers spent thousands of hours painstakingly reviewing millions of pages to comply with Congress’ law,” Bondi said. “We’ve released more than 3 million pages, including 180,000 images, all to the public, while doing our very best in the timeframe allotted by the legislation to protect victims. And if you brought us a victim’s name that was inadvertently released, we immediately redacted it.”

Bondi lashed out at lawmakers during the hearing, accusing them of ignoring Epstein’s crimes during previous presidential administrations and claiming several lawmakers, including Massie, suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Massie, a frequent target of Trump’s criticism, told HuffPost during a break in the hearing it’s actually the other way around.

“She’s got Massie Derangement Syndrome,” Massie said. “It’s her thing now. Over at the administration, it’s eating them up.”

When he looked at the files at the Justice Department, Khanna said there were hundreds of FBI documents recounting interviews with Epstein’s victims that were improperly redacted. Fixing those redactions, he said, could reveal the identities of co-conspirators who could potentially face charges. (The Justice Department told Khanna the redaction mistakes were the fault of the FBI.)

“It’ll answer people’s questions about who these powerful men were,” Khanna said.

Khanna and other members were granted access to less-redacted material on four computers inside a Justice Department office. After they used the confidential material to highlight improper redactions in the public-facing material, the department uncensored them — revealing the identities of several men who associated with Epstein who’d been named as possible co-conspirators, including the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret and a prominent Emirati businessman.

This weekend, the department faces another deadline: to justify its redactions to members of Congress in writing. The law specifically disallows redactions “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” Whatever the department tells lawmakers will likely provoke another high-profile round of questions about the government’s failure to follow the law.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), one of three Republican women who joined Massie in using a parliamentary maneuver known as a “discharge petition” to force House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to allow a vote on the Epstein disclosure bill, echoed Khanna’s gripe.

“Memos and attachments drafted by the DOJ on potential co-conspirators remain hidden. The excuse? This is how they received the data,” Mace said Tuesday on social media after reviewing the files in person. “The American people deserve every page. Every name. And every truth the government is holding onto.”

As for how to make sure the Trump administration follows through, Khanna suggested the methods they’ve used so far — including both court filings and constant media interviews — should still be effective.

“We can do things in court. We can do things in terms of the continued public pressure. That’s worked, but both we and the survivors may take court action as well,” Khanna said.

In a series of posts on X on Monday and Tuesday, Massie took credit for forcing the department to unredact questionably censored items he’d flagged. He suggested FBI director Kash Patel lied to Congress when he said the FBI had no evidence that other people committed sex trafficking crimes alongside Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.

The most recent batch of material also included a Palm Beach police detective’s recollection of speaking with Trump in 2006, and Trump saying, “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.” The report raises fresh doubts about Trump’s past claim he had “no idea” what sort of criminal mischief his former friend had been up to, not to mention the president’s account of how his friendship with Epstein ended.

Last year, amid mounting public pressure to release the Epstein material, the White House claimed Trump severed ties with Epstein because he was a “creep.” The president said it was because Epstein had poached staff from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. The alleged poaching happened around 2000; the earliest report that Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago was in 2007, after his criminal behavior became public knowledge.

Another document in the new batch — one that was improperly redacted — makes the Trump-Epstein timeline even more confusing. Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was one of the first to view the Justice Department’s less-redacted material. He discovered the department had improperly censored an email from Epstein to Maxwell that contained a lawyer’s summary of their conversation with Trump’s lawyers around 2009. Raskin told HuffPost he had seen the redacted version of the email in the public disclosures, then saw the unredacted version on the DOJ’s computer.

“It recorded [Trump] in the interview as saying Epstein was not a member at Mar-a-Lago, but he was a guest and we never sent him away,” Raskin said.

It wasn’t clear to Raskin why the material was redacted, except he was pretty sure it wasn’t done for a good reason.

“It’s certainly not within the terms of the federal law, which is just to redact to protect the victims in their privacy,” Raskin said.