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Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the Department’s review of the Epstein files “is over.” Pam Bondi has nothing else to say. Case closed, we did what we came here to do.
Epstein’s survivors say otherwise.
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Redactions are seemingly arbitrary. Congress received files that are 70-80% redacted, in violation of federal law, according to Senator Ro Khanna. And yet there are thousands of mentions of over 100 victims in the 3.5 million documents released. There are dozens of unredacted explicit images in the files.
The victims said as much in a letter to Pam Bondi, sent ahead of her testimony before congress this week.
“We must be clear: this release does not provide closure. It feels instead like a deliberate attempt to intimidate survivors, punish those who came forward, and reinforce the same culture of secrecy that allowed Epstein’s crimes to continue for decades.”
Senator Ro Khanna called this an example of full blown institutional failure on a massive scale.
“There’s a sense of rot and cover up,” he said in my conversation [ [link removed] ] with him.
Khanna and Republican congressman Thomas Massie identified six men whose names had been redacted after just two hours reviewing newly unredacted files.
“If we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering for in those 3 million files,” Khanna said on the floor.
This is institutional failure on so many levels. The Justice Department has done a disastrous job of complying with federal law. Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act last year, and it took the DOJ months to follow through on releasing them, owing to “efforts” to “thoroughly” protect victims’ privacy.
One look at the files makes you wonder what an unthorough effort would look like.
Annie Farmer, an Epstein victim said, “It feels like they want us to give up on transparency, and it’s extremely problematic how they’ve gone about doing this.”
The victims’ letter to Bondi includes 15 questions that serve as a blistering indictment of institutional failure. They are questions that members of Congress must ask Bondi themselves at Wednesday’s public congressional testimony.
“There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred,” their lawyers said.
This story explains what the headlines alone don’t. Sharing makes it visible.
In letting this happen, the DOJ has, in essence, weaponized the files against the victims, putting many of them in danger, while protecting the rich and powerful who committed the crimes.
What the Epstein files reveal is a relentless pattern of institutional breakdown: no standards, no quality control, no accountability, and a rush to close the case and pat themselves on the back, without doing any of the work required by law. They protect themselves while hanging the victims out to dry.
Maybe the most important question contained in the letter is whether anyone inside the Justice Department will ever be held accountable for it.
To find any kind of accountability, you have to look well beyond our borders. The British monarchy is having an existential crisis; the King himself has had to make a statement. It’s turned into a massive political scandal for the Brits, as two senior government aides were forced to resign. The files exposed Peter Mandelson as well, who was the former Secretary of State for Business. Prime Minister Keir Starmer appointed him ambassador to the United States last year. Starmer himself is facing mounting pressure to step down amid the fallout.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, we’ve seen absolutely no accountability. We can barely get it together to mount anything more than an anemic slap on the wrist for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who visited Epstein’s island in 2012.
Kentucky Congressman James Comer sort of floated that Lutnick might be called to testify before Congress. But we haven’t heard a peep from anyone else on that side of the aisle. This is the ultimate “silence is complicity” situation, which tells you everything you need to know about today’s MAGA Republican Party.
Why is it that these revelations are threatening to completely destabilize governments abroad, while it’s business as usual here? The long list of elites in big tech, real estate, Hollywood, and politics in the files seem to just be keeping their heads down, hoping that they’ll escape scrutiny. And so far, thanks to the Trump administration, they have.
It’s time for the United States of America to have the kind of accountability for the Epstein class that we’re seeing elsewhere in the world.
There will, eventually, be political consequences from all this. Trump has fundamentally betrayed a core promise to his base - that he would release the Epstein files and finally expose the rot within. It’s been easy up until this point for MAGA to pin this all on Pam Bondi and her incompetent handling of the whole thing, start to finish. But remember: the fish rots from the head. Pam Bondi (along with everyone else in this administration) do not act independently of Donald Trump.
The Epstein files were supposed to expose how power shields itself from consequence. Instead, history repeated itself with the release: the survivors are exposed, elites protected, and the institutions close ranks. Declaring “case closed” doesn’t resolve the failure, it confirms it.
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