The US attorney general was threatened with legal action on Sunday evening over delays in making public the full Jeffrey Epstein files as new revelations of the paedophile financier’s depravity emerged.
Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, the congressmen who wrote the bill that forced the files’ release, said they were drafting inherent contempt proceedings against Pam Bondi, the attorney general, to fine her for the period that the full files remain unpublished.
Khanna referred to Friday’s release as “more documents of nothingness” but those files revealed how Epstein demanded proof that girls recruited for him to sexually abuse were under the age of consent, while others appear to show that the FBI missed an opportunity to catch him in 1996.
Critics of President Trump’s administration were angered when it emerged that images including one of him had been removed.
Massie, a Republican, and Khanna, a Democrat, co-authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was passed in the House of Representatives last month.
Inherent contempt refers to a rarely used power which allows Congress to detain an individual in contempt of an order it has passed until they comply with demands. It has not been used since the 1930s.
Thousands of documents relating to combined investigations into Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations were published hours before Friday’s deadline. They included images of Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Michael Jackson. Images of individuals pictured with Epstein do not in themselves suggest wrongdoing.
Michael Jackson, President Clinton and Diana Ross are seen in this image released by the Department of Justice
US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE/REUTERS
The bill had ordered the files’ full release by the end of the day. The administration, however, said it now planned to publish them on a rolling basis.
Criticism of Bondi and the administration’s handling of the files intensified on Saturday when it emerged that the justice department had published then removed 16 documents. Among them was an image in which a photograph of Trump was visible inside Epstein’s desk drawer.
Democrats on the House oversight committee, addressing the attorney general, posted on X: “Pam Bondi is this true? What else is being covered up? We need transparency for the American public.”
The Department of Justice responded on Saturday night with another post on X. “Photos and other materials will continue being reviewed and redacted consistent with the law in an abundance of caution as we receive additional information.”
• Messages show Jeffrey Epstein’s depravity: ‘I have a female for him’
On Sunday Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, acknowledged that “a number of photographs” had been taken down. “That’s because a judge in New York has ordered us to listen to any victim or victim rights group if they have any concerns about the material that we’re putting up,” Blanche told NBC News.
Todd Blanche
JOHN MCDONNELL/AP
The bill required officials to conceal any content that could identify victims.
Asked why the image featuring Trump was removed, Blanche said: “You can see in that photo there are photographs of women. And so we learned after releasing that photograph that there were concerns about those women and the fact that we had put that photo up. So we pulled that photo down. It has nothing to do with President Trump.”
Blanche said Trump had been open about the social relationship he had with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s and the photograph would eventually be republished. “The only question is whether there will be redactions on the photo,” he said.
Asked if he took the warnings from Massie and Khanna seriously, Blanche said: “Not even a little bit. Bring it on. We are doing everything we’re supposed to be doing to comply with this statute.”
• New photos of Epstein island offer a ‘disturbing’ look inside
Blanche had said on Friday that “several hundred thousand more” files would become available “over the next couple weeks”.
However, some Republicans said they believed a lengthy process would hurt the administration. “Any evidence, or any kind of indication that there’s not a full reveal on this, this will just plague them for months and months more,” Rand Paul, a Republican senator and longstanding advocate for the files’ release, told ABC News.
Some redactions have already been reversed. On Sunday the Department of Justice republished 119 pages of grand jury material from the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell for child sex-trafficking in New York in 2021.
The document had been entirely blacked out when published. In a post on X on Sunday, the department said the document now had “minimal redactions”.
Epstein, 66, was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell in 2019. He was awaiting federal trial on charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy.