Thomas Massie says that when U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi appears before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday he plans to ask why many of the Jeffrey Epstein files remain redacted.
U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie at a 2024 event in Las Vegas. (Gage Skidmore/ Flickr/ CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Stephen Prager
Common Dreams
With 3 million Jeffrey Epstein files still being withheld from the public, Rep. Thomas Massie is trying to force transparency from President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice.
Massie (R-Ky.), who has pushed harder than any other Republican for the release of the files pertaining to the late sex criminal and his circle of powerful friends, joined Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to view unredacted versions of the DOJ files on Monday.
Under a law introduced by Massie and Khanna last year, which Congress passed almost unanimously, the DOJ was required to release all files to the public in December without redacting information solely to protect public figures from embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 18, 2025, voting 427–1 to approve the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Clay Higgins (R-LA-3) was the sole representative to vote against it. (U.S. Congress/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
But millions still remain under lock and key, while those made public, including a tranche of more than 3 million released late last month, are heavily redacted.
Those files contained many references to Trump as well as other powerful figures, including former President Bill Clinton, tech billionaires Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and former British Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson.
Meanwhile, files containing compromising mentions of Trump were uploaded to the site before being swiftly deleted — including a list of unverified FBI tips that described the president participating in the heinous abuse of children.
In a Sunday appearance on CNN‘s “Inside Politics,” Massie accused the Trump administration of violating the law by failing to meet the deadline for the public release of information and by releasing the names of victims while covering up the names of alleged perpetrators.
He said that of particular interest were the FBI’s 302 files, which contain information from official interviews with witnesses and victims of Epstein’s abuse, which he said the DOJ is still withholding.
He also said the DOJ was “overredacting” documents related to “some really sketchy emails” between Epstein and associates, on which “we can’t see who the sender was.”
Massie said that Attorney General Pam Bondi “will be in front of my committee,” referring to the House Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday to answer questions about the release of the files.
He said he plans to ask her why the rest of the documents have not been released, why — even with the delays that purportedly gave officials time to ensure victims’ identifying information was redacted — they still published the names of some victims, and what information has been redacted from the files.
Those screeching “name names on the floor of the House now” have lost the plot. We passed a bill and it’s the DOJ’s job to show the files. Yesterday, Ro & I pressured DOJ to unredact several people who the FBI labeled as coconspirators in 2019. Here’s before-and-after yesterday. pic.twitter.com/b1EIo63zES
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) February 10, 2026
Massie [in his Sunday CNN appearance], also remarked on the revelation in the latest batch of files that Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who’d claimed to have cut ties with Epstein back in 2005, had actually continued a business and personal relationship with him years after he’d been convicted of sex crimes in 2008. This included joint business ventures, dinner gatherings and a planned trip to Epstein’s infamous private island in 2012. [Lutnick admitted during a Senate hearing on Tuesday that he and his family had visited Epstein on his island.]
WATCH: Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admits he visited Epstein’s island and lied to Congress about cutting off contact after Epstein had already been busted for soliciting a minor for prostitution pic.twitter.com/oGErntKICD
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) February 10, 2026
Massie says Lutnick “should just resign.” He said that Mandelson and the former Prince Andrew, another prominent Epstein associate who was stripped of his royal title, have resigned in disgrace from their posts “for less than Lutnick lied about.”
On Friday, amid mounting pressure from lawmakers and the public, the DOJ sent a letter to members of Congress — obtained by the Associated Press — informing them that they could inspect the documents.
Legislators were required to give the DOJ 24 hours’ notice before arriving and will be required to view the documents in a tightly-controlled “reading room.” They are also barred from creating electronic copies of the files for distribution, but they may take notes.
In a post to social media Sunday, Massie called on inquisitive followers to point out which concerning documents they want him to scrutinize, saying those that receive the most “likes” will be his first priority.
[After viewing some of the unreacted files with Massie, Khanna on Tuesday read aloud the names on the House floor of half a dozen men he said are “likely incriminated” in the files. The list includes billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner.]
Among the documents that have garnered the most outrage and demands for transparency are:
- A 2014 email in which a person, whose name has been redacted, thanked Epstein “for a fun night” and told him “your littlest girl was a little naughty”;
- Another 2014 email in which a person, whose name has been redacted, said they were giving Epstein “permission to kill” an unspecified person;
- A 2009 email in which a person, whose name has been redacted, received an email from Epstein saying he “loved the torture video” [Massie later identified Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman and CEO of DP World, an international logistics company worth billions headquartered in Dubai, as the recipient.]
- And a heavily redacted federal prosecution memo, sent after Epstein’s death in 2019 to then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, which discusses investigative steps and possible liability of Epstein’s associates, and several uninvestigated claims relating to complicity and participation in his crimes. That file was deleted shortly after being uploaded to the DOJ website.
On Monday, Epstein’s convicted accomplice Ghislane Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for the sex-trafficking of minors, refused to answer questions from the House Oversight Committee about who else was involved in Epstein’s abuse, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
As Khanna pointed out, she did not do this in July when she privately answered questions from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Ro Khanna: “?Who were the other men who raped these underage girls? Did [Ghislaine Maxwell] have any conversations about a deal with Donald Trump?…She’s pleading the Fifth…Why did she not plead the fifth when Blanche asked her questions?” pic.twitter.com/yQWL9OR8JX
— Home of the Brave (@OfTheBraveUSA) February 9, 2026
Khanna sent a letter to House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) containing a list of questions for Maxwell about any knowledge she has of other co-conspirators, the extent of Epstein’s and Trump’s involvement, and whether Trump offered her a pardon in exchange for her silence.
“The American people will see that there’s an inconsistency,” Khanna told reporters on Monday. “Why didn’t she plead the Fifth when Blanche asked her questions, but now she’s pleading the Fifth about things that don’t implicate her, but may implicate many of the other powerful people in the Epstein class that committed these crimes?”
Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
The views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Americans who watched and listened closely to the 5-hour congressional hearing/question-and-answer (question-and-obfuscation) of Attorney General Pam Bondi were left stunned and speechless by the nauseating, scandalous spectacle, unable to find words in the English language sufficient for accurately describing the extent of gaslighting to which Pam Bondi and the Trump administration have consciously, willingly resorted to protect their very rich and very powerful friends.
“Friends” … guilty of the worst imaginable crimes.
This is yet further proof of the lawlessness of this administration.
We all know Trump considers himself, as president, above the law – but this recklessness extends throughout his administration, with various departments, such as the DOJ [the one that should be adhereing strictly to the law and the Constitution] flouting the laws and Congress itself.
It sets a precedent, which future administrations will undoubtedly exploit. But worse still, it signals the outwardly visible decay of the structure of government, and the utter disregard for laws of all kinds, and ultimately the Constutution itself – the last bastion of law and order.
There is no going back on this moral, ethical and behavioural decline, without major and fundamental changes to the nature and form of government in the USA, as well as the mechanisms it uses to uphold its moral and standards, such as they might be.
It is an inherently corruptible, and corrupted, system, riddled with gaping holes to be exploited. It attracts people with very low standards of morality, humanity and integrity – the worst kind of person to put in power, and strongly resists those who would reform it for the better in any way.
It even allows foregn influence to infiltrate, corrupt, hijack, and drive policy at the highest levels – as evidenced by the vast majority of representatives and senators beholden and ensalved to the Zionist cause.
I and many others justifiably have many complaints regarding the sensationalistic “limited hangout” way in which the Epstein case has been handled from c. 2019 onward and especially as of 2025-26. All the same, given the relative obscurity in which the Epstein saga once lingered during and prior to the time between when I first learned about the case from Nick Bryant’s reportage (initially via Bryant’s radio interview with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and her co-host Peter B. Collins, comparing Bryant’s coverage to her own insider knowledge regarding Dennis Hastert) in Jan. 2015 and Julie K. Brown’s 2018-19 reportage on Epstein in The Miami Herald that finally led to Epstein’s second arrest, I still cannot help but be impressed with how far things have come as a result of the initial interest of those such as Bryant, Catherine Ostler, Vicky Ward, Nigel Rosser, and others (even with the misconduct of those such as Jimmy Savile and Bill Cosby gaining increasing public attention at the time, a part of me cynically assumed that Epstein-related truths would never command the public’s interest in such a significant and sustained manner as they have thus far in the 2020s, much as they mostly still have not in the case of the Franklin scandal, the Dutroux case in Belgium, and so many others).
My “wife and I” decided “I” will will never be in the same room with him again .
Ain’t that so wifey , Did you hear me speak for you ?
Yep yep yep my dear , now fire up the yacth .
Subpoena Jamie Dimon and fully investigate JPMorgan; force the release of SAR info. now. The emails prove Lutnick was in communication with Epstein during Epstein’s Really Big Short>>>
+ Jeffrey Epstein’s Really Big Short
In addition to his sex crimes, Epstein ran an obscure company that accrued billions in liabilities in the same dicey securities that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Know who bailed him out? You did!
CRAIG UNGER
JAN 27, 2026
excerpts:
If you paid federal income taxes back during the 2008 fiscal crisis, you may not know it, but the sad truth is that it you were likely bailing out Jeffrey Epstein as well—to the tune of nearly $7 billion.
To understand what Epstein was doing at Liquid Funding, let’s go back to 2008, an era when the amped up, coke-fueled Big Swinging Dicks of Wall Street feasted on tranches of risky credit default swaps, residential mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and all sorts of arcane securities that were sold to pension funds and conservative investors as “safe” when their chief attribute was that they were so insanely complex—and deliberately so— that no one understood what was inside them or the risks.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan had delayed filings of its SARs concerning Epstein year after year. Indeed, it was not until shortly after Epstein’s death in 2019, that JPMorgan filed a massive Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, flagging over 4,700 suspicious transactions in Epstein’s accounts involving more than $1 billion going back as far as October 2003. Some of the SARs were not filed until nearly seventeen years after the transaction had taken place.
In November, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, called for JPMorgan to be “fully investigated to determine whether this underreporting of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) was deliberate.” But Wyden’s bill to make public the SARs, the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA), failed to pass the Senate, thanks to Republican opposition. As Wyden’s colleague, Jeff Merkley (D-OR) put it, “51 Senators in this body, I am ashamed to say, said, ‘Hell, no. We want them kept secret. We want to protect the perpetrators.’ Why? Because the man in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump, told us he wants to protect those files, does not want them to go public.”
The Federal Reserve has never released detailed asset schedules for Maiden Lane LLC, but the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that American taxpayers paid for Liquid Funding’s $6.7 billion in liabilities. No other explanation is economically or legally plausible.
hxxps://craigunger.substack.com/p/jeffrey-epsteins-really-big-short