Graphic by Dani Ramirez and Esmeralda Meckler
Written by Steven Mynott
The Epstein Files Transparency Act that President Donald Trump signed in Nov. 2025 required the Department of Justice to release all documents related to its investigation of child sex trafficker, Jeffery Epstein by Dec. 19. The files are believed to contain incriminating evidence against some of the world’s most rich and powerful people. The DOJ claims that all of the files have been released, however congressional representatives claim that there is more that needs to be released in order to comply with the law.
To learn more about the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, check out this article that The CI View published last November.
To view what has been released so far, click here. The files contain disturbing content; viewer discretion is advised.
Attorney General Pam Bondi defended the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Feb. 11. During the hearing, Bondi repeatedly dodged questions, sometimes by making personal attacks against lawmakers and sometimes by drawing attention to crimes in the lawmakers’ own districts.
One moment from the hearing that went particularly viral online was when Bondi touted strong economic numbers under Trump’s administration. She stated, “The DOW is over 50,000 right now, the S&P at almost 7,000 and the NASDAQ smashing records. Americans’ 401Ks and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.” This may be true, but, as many have pointed out, this hearing was about the Epstein files, not the economy. The data she brought up was not relevant to the topic of the hearing nor any of the questions she was asked.
Some of the most impactful questioning came from Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington. She opened by stating, “The Epstein fFiles Transparency Act required your Department of Justice to disclose the perpetrators connected with Epstein’s criminal activities and to redact the information of survivors to protect their identities. Let me show you what actually happened. First, in violation of the law, your department has shown a pattern of redacting the names of powerful predators.” She then showed an example of an incriminating email with the name of the sender redacted. The sender was later revealed to be Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, a powerful businessman from The United Arab Emirates with financial ties to Trump. Jayapal continued, “Second, the survivors were not similarly protected, also in violation of the law.” To demonstrate this, she pointed to an email that the DOJ released that included the unredacted names of 32 survivors whose identities were supposed to be protected. In addition, Jayapal stated that the DOJ has released numerous other files with the names, emails, addresses, nude photos, and identities of Jane Does who had been protected for decades. She concluded her questioning by asking the ten survivors in the audience to stand and raise their hands if they have not been able to meet with Bondi’s DOJ. All ten raised their hands. To Bondi, Jayapal asked, “Will you turn to them now and apologize for what your Department of Justice has put them through with the absolutely unacceptable release of the Epstein files and their information?” Bondi refused to answer the question, first, by trying to deflect blame to the previous Attorney General, Merrick Garland and then saying, “I’m not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics.”
Rep. Jaime Raskin of Maryland put it bluntly when the hearing was over “I think that the Department of Justice has been trying to sweep the entire thing under the rug,” he told a reporter. He went on, “The more I’ve gotten into it, the more I believe that the survivors here, the victims who are now active citizens for justice, really are leading the way. We need to be having hearings with survivors to hear from them about their experiences so that they can explain what happened, and so that they can begin to set forth a theory of what took place. We need to be investigating the money, we need to be investigating the organizational hierarchy. There’s no way you run a billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring with just two people committing crimes: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. It doesn’t work like that.” So far, none of the survivors have been invited to any hearings on the matter.
In a letter signed by 24 survivors of Epstein’s abuse they said, “We must be clear: this release does not provide closure. It feels instead like a deliberate attempt to intimidate survivors, punish those who came forward, and reinforce the same culture of secrecy that allowed Epstein’s crimes to continue for decades.”
Co-author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Rep. Ro Khanna of California said, “Every single person who has emails showing that they visited the island, especially after Epstein was a convicted pedophile, should be coming before the congress and answering questions and being investigated, and the Justice Department should start a special prosecution investigatory committee into this issue.” He continued, “The survivors didn’t just want these names out there, they wanted action, they wanted investigations, they wanted accountability.”
