After months in which Donald Trump repeatedly refused to authorize the publication of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein case in the hope that the storm would calm down on its own, on Wednesday evening the president of the United States signed the law ordering their release to his Department of Justice.
He had already announced that he would do so if the law passed Congress. What no one in Washington was counting on was that it would do so, this Tuesday, so quickly and with such agreement between the two sides. Only one member, Congressman Clay Higgins (Trumpist from Louisiana), voted against the text. The rest, 427 members of Congress and 100 senators, supported it, so Trump, who had given permission to Republicans on Capitol Hill to support the initiative, found himself with few options once the bill reached his table.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act orders Attorney General Pam Bondi to release unclassified documents relating to the millionaire pedophile and Ghislaine Maxwell, the organizer of his sex trafficking ring and an accomplice to many of his crimes. Bondi, who changed his mind in July about releasing those materials after months of promising to release Epstein documents, has 30 days from signing to comply with the order.
Such disclosure must, under the rule, be “systematic” and include documents in the possession of the Department of Justice. This is a diverse and endless collection of files. There are millions of pages, including flight logs, personal communications, internal reports, metadata, immunity agreements, financial employee contracts, and emails.
The law approved by Congress, however, provides for some exceptions that allow the Department of Justice to reserve information that could transform this new declassification into another chapter in the history of disappointments accumulated in this case by those who want it to be clarified once and for all how far Epstein’s sex trafficking network reached and which rich and powerful men participated in it or, at least, were aware of the crimes of the pedophile and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. He is serving 20 years in a minimum-security prison after cooperating with the Trump administration last July.
In any case, the law requires that published material be easily consultable and downloadable. And it authorizes the Justice Department to censor information that could be compromising to victims, materials depicting child sexual abuse, shocking images, or data that could jeopardize an active investigation. Bondi is obliged to justify these censorships and asks Congress for an additional report detailing their contents. crossed out within 15 days of publication.
“We will observe the law,” Bondi said three times this Wednesday when asked by reporters. “In the meantime, we will continue to protect victims and act with transparency.” Asked what had changed since his Department said in a statement in July that they would no longer release materials, the attorney general offered a casual response: “There’s information, new information, additional information, but, again, we’re just going to obey (whatever) the law says.” Before that change of heart, and as we later learned, Bondi had warned Trump in a meeting at the White House that his name appeared “everywhere” in the newspapers of the billionaire pedophile, with whom he had been in a friendly relationship for 15 years.
The victims, gathered at the Capitol on Tuesday to accompany the passage of the new law, said they fear that the Trump administration will turn over excessively censored material or that they will cling to the existence of these ongoing investigations. Specifically, those ordered by the President of the United States in Bondi last Friday. Then, he asked him to investigate Epstein’s ties to some of the names that repeatedly appeared on the papers that became known over the years.
(Breaking news. More information coming soon)
