“These victims have spoken. They've been very clear about who has caused them harm, and we need to believe these women,” says Lauren Hersh, who founded World Without Exploitation to combat human trafficking and sexual exploitation in 2016. She was the organizer of the gathering, where she served as poster-board distributor and marker replacer. She is also one of the strategists whose efforts on behalf of the women on that roof and those like them helped upended the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.
In short order, these women helped force the hand of Congress, Trump, and all Americans to move toward disclosing the sins of Epstein and Maxwell—and possibly others in power. By Dec. 19, the Department of Justice must, by a bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump, disclose what it knows about the sex trafficking operations that sprawled across years and states. Three times this month, judges have sided with those who have asked to see previously secret grand jury records, in part opened because of the Trump-backed measure. And on Thursday, Senate Democrats wrote to Justice’s internal watchdog asking for an independent check to make sure everything is handled properly.
Washington, D.C. — Today, Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released the following statement after the Oversight Committee received new photos from the Epstein estate. This latest production contains over 95,000 photos, including images of the wealthy and powerful men who spent time with Jeffrey Epstein. Images also include thousands of photographs of women and Epstein properties. Oversight Democrats are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release photos to the public in the days and weeks ahead. Committee Democrats are committed to protecting the identities of the survivors. 19 photos can be accessed here.
“It is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends,” said Ranking Member Robert Garcia. “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, NOW.”
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Even with all released on Friday, Democrats withheld some items. David Gilmour (MEDIAITE) explains what happened Friday on CNN:
CNN host Kasie Hunt was left unnerved after pressing Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) for details on the “disturbing” and “sexually explicit” nature of images from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate seen by House Democrats that they chose not to include in Friday’s release.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Friday released two batches of photographs, offering a new glimpse into the convicted sex offender’s social orbit. The images show Epstein alongside a range of powerful figures, including former President Bill Clinton, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson.
President Donald Trump appeared in several of the photos, one of which includes Epstein. Another shows Trump standing with a woman whose face has been redacted, while a third depicts him with six women, all similarly obscured.
The release awaits curating by the media. Anna Kaufman (USA TODAY) notes one early standout:
So now that the DoJ apparently has opened some new criminal investigation into somebody or something, it will have the power under the new law to withhold any Epstein-related documents that might touch on those probes. Yet we don’t know exactly who is under investigation or how broadly those inquiries might span. Anyone outside the DoJ therefore will be essentially blind. We won’t know what we won’t know, and we’ll all just have to take Bondi’s word for it.
But surely the Justice Department — this Justice Department — isn’t investigating Trump himself. So any documents about his relationship with Epstein wouldn’t be covered by the criminal-investigations clause. And that brings us to the second exception: The law permits the Justice Department to withhold or redact any information that could compromise “national defense or foreign policy” or “the national security of the United States.”
Well, one might reasonably wonder, how could information about Trump and Epstein going club-hopping and female-ogling in the 1990s possibly put the country’s safety at risk? The answer, again, lies with Bondi alone. Couldn’t our servile attorney general conclude that any materials that might embarrass the president — our commander-in-chief and chief foreign diplomat — could harm his standing with other nations, thereby undermining our foreign policy?
Roll your eyes if you will — I’m with you — but that decision, again, will be Bondi’s alone. And, again, neither you nor I, and neither Congress nor the victims and anyone else in any position to object, will know what documents Bondi has chosen to withhold and why. All she needs is a hook, and the new law provides her with enough of those to do essentially whatever she wants.
We’ll see the Epstein files, or some portion of them, next week. We can reasonably expect to learn new details about Epstein’s criminal ring and about bad conduct by prominent men. But the new law, by its broad exemptions, ensures that we won’t get the most important answers — especially when Pam Bondi is the one who gets to decide.
"Julie,
let's talk about Ghislaine Maxwell, because there's a lot of headlines
about her," said Velshi. "There's a lot of machination on her part to
get commutation of her sentence. Nobody in the administration has said
that's a nonstarter. But this is a convicted sex offender who already,
as a result of a very unorthodox interview with the deputy attorney
general, seems to have been getting preferential treatment."
"What's your sense of what Ghislaine Maxwell's role in this current set of developments can be?" Velshi asked.
"Well, I think that she's aiming for a pardon," agreed Brown. "I think that she has — I think she knows a lot of information. She obviously knows who was involved with Epstein, who helped Epstein. She really can provide a key for exactly how it operated. But of course, during her trial and even after, she's claimed she didn't know anything, she had no information."
The departure of Adm. Alvin Holsey after barely a year on a job that most stay in for several years has fed suspicions about behind-the-scenes tensions with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the boat strikes and a possible brewing U.S. attack on Venezuela.
As commander of Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which oversees U.S. military operations in Latin America, Holsey has presided over the Trump administration's killing of at least 87 people it alleges were engaged in drug trafficking on boats traversing international waters.
The New York Times has reported that Holsey raised concerns about the boat strikes, and the Wall Street Journal wrote that Hegseth had asked him for months to step down.
Holsey has given no public indication that his departure is linked to those operations.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was condemned on Friday by a non-governmental group of military justice experts who said he had committed the "worst-case scenario."
NIMJ, which bills itself as "the only non-governmental organization in the United States to educate about and encourage a fair court-martial and military justice system," issued a press release ahead of the weekend addressing a recent scandal from Hegseth. Specifically, the group said it "condemns any attempt by military leaders to punish Senator Mark Kelly, a military retiree, for his speech" in connection with a video he and other veterans made for members of the military.
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