Two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are demanding that the Justice Department conduct an internal audit of its handling of the material on the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case and deliver the results to the committee and its counterpart in the House by Jan. 19.
In a letter sent Wednesday to the acting inspector general at the Justice Department, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the ranking member on the committee, and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., asked for a review of material that details the chain of custody of the Epstein documents to “show in detail who had control of evidence so that questions concerning contamination, tampering, or concealment do not arise.”
Schiff and Durbin cited concerns of “political interference” in the department’s review and release of the Epstein files.
“This audit will help confirm for Congress and the public that the Epstein files that will be released are identical to those collected by law enforcement, other than any legally required redactions,” the senators wrote.
The senators cited the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was passed last month by Congress in a rare vote of bipartisanship. The act requires the Justice Department to publicly release all of the documents in its possession related to federal investigations into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and his long-time accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. The files must be released by Dec. 19, according to the law.
The letter is the latest move by Democrats to raise questions about possible White House interference in the documents’ content.
In a letter to the Justice Department last month, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, accused the DOJ and the FBI of stonewalling an active criminal investigation into Epstein and Maxwell’s possible co-conspirators after Trump took office in January.
The investigation, run by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, ceased after the department ordered prosecutors to transfer the case files to DOJ headquarters in Washington. The DOJ and the FBI formally closed the case in July, citing a lack of evidence that justified an investigation against uncharged third parties.
The department said its “systematic review” revealed no incriminating Epstein client list, although U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had said she had the list on her desk. Bondi and the White House later clarified she had been referring to the tranche of Epstein case files in DOJ possession, not a single client list. Though the transparency act demands a broad scope of documents be released, it exempts any information that could publicly identify Epstein’s victims. It also exempts information that could jeopardize national security and ongoing federal investigations. The letter comes a day after a federal judge in New York ordered the release of sealed grand jury transcripts from Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case. On Tuesday, a federal judge in New York agreed to unseal grand jury materials from Maxwell’s criminal prosecution. Last week, a federal judge in Florida granted the unsealing of grand jury transcripts from an investigation of Epstein in the early 2000s.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
