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The Department of Justice released what it intended to be its final disclosure under the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Saturday, and the reaction from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle was immediate and scathing. The disclosure included a list of more than 250 names, ranging from convicted predators to long-dead celebrities, with virtually no context explaining why any of them appeared.
Janis Joplin is on the list. So is Queen Elizabeth. So is Larry Nassar, who went to prison for the sexual abuse of hundreds of young women and child pornography. The DOJ offered no explanation for how any of these names surfaced in the Epstein files or what relevance, if any, they have to the convicted sex offender’s crimes.
That is the problem.
A law designed for clarity, weaponized for confusion
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Trump, was drafted specifically to force the DOJ’s hand, The Hill reported. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) co-authored the legislation with a clear mandate: release the files, explain the redactions, and show the American public why prosecutorial decisions were made the way they were.
Instead, the DOJ produced a document dump that reads more like an obstruction strategy than a compliance effort. The department’s own letter acknowledged that names appear in the files “in a wide variety of contexts,” noting:
“Names appear in the files released under the Act in a wide variety of contexts. For example, some individuals had extensive direct email contact with Epstein or Maxwell while other individuals are mentioned only in a portion of a document (including press reporting) that on its face is unrelated to the Epstein and Maxwell matters.”
The DOJ knows this. It stated it plainly. And then it released the names anyway, without sorting the significant from the irrelevant, without flagging who merited scrutiny and who appeared only because an FBI news roundup happened to mention their name alongside Epstein’s.
Rep. Khanna captured the absurdity on X:
“To have Janis Joplin, who died when Epstein was 17, in the same list as Larry Nassar, who went to prison for the sexual abuse of hundreds of young women and child pornography, with no clarification of how either was mentioned in the files is absurd.”
Deliberative process privilege: the DOJ’s favorite escape hatch
Beyond the name dump, the DOJ invoked two legal shields to withhold documents entirely: attorney-client privilege and deliberative process privilege, an exemption typically used in public records cases to shield materials showing how the government reached a decision.
The problem, as Massie explained on ABC’s “This Week,” is that the law was written to override exactly this kind of maneuver:
“The problem with that is the bill that Ro Khanna and I wrote says that they must release internal memos and notes and emails about their decisions on whether to prosecute or not prosecute, whether to investigate or not investigate.”
This is the core question the legislation was designed to answer. Ghislaine Maxwell remains the only person ever charged in connection with Epstein beyond Epstein himself. The American public has spent years asking why. The law was supposed to force the DOJ to show its work.
Massie made the stakes explicit:
“It’s important they follow that because then we could find why they didn’t prosecute Leslie Wexner. What was the decision tree there? And also, why in 2008 they gave Jeffrey Epstein such a light sentence?”
Les Wexner, the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, was deposed on Wednesday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Lawmakers have been probing Wexner’s ties to Epstein for years, and the DOJ’s refusal to release internal deliberations about whether to prosecute him only deepens the suspicion that the department is protecting the powerful.
Muddying the waters is the strategy
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) appeared on MS NOW Monday and offered perhaps the bluntest assessment of what the DOJ accomplished with its disclosure:
“It’s to muddy the waters. It is to lump in obvious people who have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and his sex trafficking ring with other people who may be accomplices or may have been involved, and it’s a further effort to cover up for the pedophiles and the co-conspirators.”
Goldman also addressed the deliberative process claim directly:
“The bill very specifically requires them to turn over all of the type of documents that would be included in the deliberative process privilege. Now, it’s one thing for Congress to demand that — it’s another thing in a piece of legislation that Donald Trump signed into law for him to then turn around and say, ‘No, I’m not complying with the law.’”
Khanna echoed this, accusing the DOJ of protecting specific individuals while simultaneously dumping names without context. He pointed to Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the Emirati businessman who recently resigned from his company after it was revealed he penned an email to Epstein referencing a torture video, and Wexner as examples of powerful figures the DOJ has shielded.
“DOJ violated the law by not providing a reason for the redactions, has protected people like Sultan and Les Wexner and many other powerful people Rep. Thomas Massie and I are exposing, and then chose to unredact the names without context.”
The pattern is familiar
Consider the sequence. Congress passes a bipartisan transparency law. The President signs it. The DOJ, the institution legally obligated to comply, responds by dumping a list so sprawling and decontextualized that it obscures more than it reveals, while simultaneously invoking privilege claims the law was specifically written to prevent.
The list includes former Vice President Dick Cheney, Julian Assange, and Mick Jagger alongside a reference to a prosecutor’s list of possible co-conspirators. The DOJ declined to distinguish between the two categories. It is unclear what ties, if any, several of the named figures have to Epstein.
This is not transparency. It is the bureaucratic simulation of transparency, designed to allow officials to claim compliance while delivering nothing of substance. The DOJ released everything and explained nothing, which is a sophisticated way of releasing nothing at all.
What happens next
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is clearly not waiting for the DOJ to find its conscience. Wexner’s Wednesday deposition signals that Congress intends to pursue the answers the DOJ refuses to provide. Massie and Khanna, a Republican and a Democrat who agree on virtually nothing else, remain united in pressuring the department to comply with the law they wrote.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.
That silence is becoming its own answer. A bipartisan law, signed by the President, designed to reveal why the most connected sex trafficker in modern American history faced so few consequences, is being stonewalled by the very institution that failed to prosecute the people around him in the first place. The same DOJ that gave Epstein a light sentence in 2008 and charged no one beyond Maxwell is now claiming it cannot show the public why.
The files exist. The law requires their release. The DOJ chose chaos over compliance. And somewhere in those withheld memos and redacted deliberations are the names of people who should have been prosecuted and the reasons they weren’t.
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