Donald Trump signed into law on Wednesday the bill ordering the Justice Department to release the documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case. Or at least, that's what he said he did, 24 hours after the measure passed swiftly in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The resolution had arrived at the White House from the Capitol hours earlier. The President of the United States chose to sign it without witnesses or the usual ceremony. He announced that he had signed it in a message on his social media account, Truth, after 9:00 p.m. (local time), at the end of a day in which, unusually for him, he avoided the press. By then, no one in Washington expected him to sign it until the following day.
In his message on Truth, Trump says little about the law, the crimes of his former friend, or his victims. He does, however, take the opportunity to remind readers that Epstein was arrested and died in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan (a suicide, according to the coroner) during his first term as president; he says that Epstein “was a lifelong Democrat”; and he takes credit for the bill's passage, because last Sunday he authorized his party members to support it in both houses of Congress.
“The Democrats have used the ‘Epstein’ issue [quotation marks are his], which affects them far more than it does the Republican Party, to try to distract from our INCREDIBLE victories,” the US president wrote, before listing those triumphs with a mixture of exaggerations, lies, and half-truths.
In his message, Trump cited former President Bill Clinton, Larry Summers (whose emails with the financier were published last week) for his “close ties” to the pedophile, Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (whom he accused of soliciting money from Epstein after his prosecution), and Democratic Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett (another whose connections to the pedophile have been exposed by the latest emails).
The signing of the agreement ends months in which Trump repeatedly refused to authorize the release of Epstein's files, hoping that the storm, which had intensified particularly from his supporters in the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, would simply subside. The signing also sets the clock ticking for the Justice Department, which now has 30 days to make available to the public the vast amount of material related to the pedophile's crimes and the connections these documents may reveal to his circle of wealthy and powerful friends.
He had the power to veto it, but Trump had already announced he would sign it if the bill passed Congress. What no one in Washington expected was that he would do so this Tuesday, so swiftly and with such a broad agreement between both parties. Only one representative, Clay Higgins (a Trump supporter from Louisiana), voted against the bill. The rest—427 members of Congress and 100 senators—supported it, after Trump gave the Republicans on Capitol Hill the go-ahead to back the initiative.
Between privacy and censorship
The Epstein Files Transparency Act orders Attorney General Pam Bondi to release unclassified documents related to the millionaire pedophile and Ghislaine Maxwell, the fixer for his sex trafficking ring and an accomplice in many of his crimes. Bondi, who in July reversed her decision to release these materials after months of promising to free Epstein's files, has 30 days from the date of the order to comply. This change of strategy came after a meeting at the White House in which she warned the president, who was a friend of the pedophile financier for 15 years, that his name was"all over" the papers.
According to the rule, this disclosure must be “systematic.” It includes documents held by the Department of Justice; a varied and vast collection of files. We are talking about millions of pages, including flight logs, personal communications, internal reports, metadata, immunity agreements, contracts with the financier's employees, and emails.
The law passed by Congress, however, includes exceptions that allow the Justice Department to withhold information that could turn this new declassification into another chapter in the story of accumulated disappointments in this case for those who want it clarified once and for all how far Epstein's sex trafficking network reached and who participated in it or, at least, had knowledge of the crimes of the pedophile and his accomplice Maxwell. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence in a minimum-security facility after cooperating with the Trump Administration last July, and is now maneuvering to obtain a presidential pardon.
The law requires that published material be easily accessible and downloadable. It also authorizes the Department of Justice to censor information that could be compromising to victims, materials with descriptions of child sexual abuse, graphic images, or data that could jeopardize an ongoing investigation. Bondi is obligated to justify these censorships, and Congress is required to prepare an additional report detailing the redacted content within 15 days of publication.
“We will obey the law,” Bondi told reporters three times on Wednesday. “Meanwhile, we will continue to protect victims and act with transparency.” When asked what had changed since her department said in a statement in July that it would no longer release materials, the attorney general offered a halting response: “There is information, new information, additional information, but, again, we will simply obey the law.”
The victims, gathered Tuesday at the Capitol to support the passage of the new law, said they feared the Trump administration would release heavily redacted material or exploit the existence of these ongoing investigations. Specifically, they referred to the investigation ordered by the US president to Bondi last Friday, when he asked him to look into Epstein's connections to prominent Democrats (Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman) whose names have repeatedly surfaced in the documents that have come to light over the years. Trump again attacked this trio of figures in his message this Wednesday on Truth.
In it, the Republican also compared the effort to release the Epstein papers to the scandal of alleged Kremlin interference in the 2016 elections, which brought him to the White House by surprise and which he often refers to as “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.” “For years, our great nation has had to endure (...) the first and second impeachments [referring to the two impeachment proceedings brought against him during his first term] and many other witch hunts and hoaxes created by the Democrats, all of them terrible and divisive for our country, and carried out to confuse, divert attention, and distract from the excellent work being done by Republicans and the Trump Administration. This latest hoax will backfire on the Democrats, just like all the others!”
Longtime Washingtonians are recalling another declassification these days: the John F. Kennedy Archives Act of 1992. Congress then mandated the gradual release of documents related to Kennedy's assassination and established similar protocols for handling classified information. Many of those papers were released, although successive administrations invoked national security exemptions to delay their full disclosure. In 2017, Trump ordered the release of thousands of documents about JFK and added more this year, but more than thirty years later, there is still material yet to be made public.
