Closing summary
We are pausing our live coverage of the justice department’s partial release of heavily redacted documents from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who socialized with Donald Trump for more than 15 years. We will continue reporting on what’s in the files, and disquiet over what has not been released in the days and weeks ahead. Here is some of what we learned:
The justice department appears to be in violation of the law that required the release of all of the Epstein files by a Friday deadline, according to the two congressmen who drafted the legislation, Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican.
Khanna said that the partial “document dump this afternoon does not comply” with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and told CNN, “The most important documents are missing.” Those documents are a draft 60-count federal indictment outlining charges against Epstein that was drawn up by a federal prosecutor in Florida in 2007, and a detailed memorandum summarizing the evidence that was disregarded by the US attorney, Alex Acosta, who chose instead to offer Epstein an extraordinarily lenient plea deal.
“Attorney General Pam Bondi is withholding specific documents that the law required her to release by today,” Massie said, and suggested that she could be prosecuted for obstruction of justice by a future administration.
Jennifer Freeman, a lawyer who represents the Epstein survivor Maria Farmer in her lawsuit against the federal government, told our colleague Victoria Bekiempis that one newly released document was important: an FBI report from 1996, documenting Farmer’s effort to report her abuse by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “Maria Farmer reported Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes in 1996,” Freeman said. “Had the government done their job, and properly investigated Maria’s report, over 1,000 victims could have been spared and 30 years of trauma avoided.”
There were many images of Bill Clinton, but very little about Trump in the portion of the files released on Friday. But one seemingly innocuous snapshot of Epstein’s bookcase did include a reminder that he and Trump were once close. The image showed Epstein’s copy of Trump’s 1997 book, Trump: The Art of the Comeback, which the New York Times reported in July included an inscription from Trump reading: “To Jeff – You are the greatest!”
Updated
One of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims has accused the justice department of stalling.
Lisa Phillips was in her 20s when she met the disgraced financier and says she suffered years of abuse from him and people linked to him.
She told CNN that she believes the Department of Justice was “protecting themselves, not the victims,” after Trump officials released only partial files that were heavily redacted.
“I feel like they have so much information to start connecting the dots and for survivors to get justice. But as you’re seeing, we just keep stalling,” she added.
