A US House committee releases the first batch of Epstein documents
A US House of Representatives committee on Tuesday evening released more than 33,000 pages of documents related to the case of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, who is accused of committing sex crimes and sexually exploiting minors, after the Justice Department provided them.
The publication of these documents comes at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration is being accused of a lack of transparency in this issue.
The committee published this first batch of documents online in one block, without any tabulation or arrangement.
This step comes after the Justice Department released on Friday a transcript of a recent interrogation of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner, in which she confirmed that she had never observed inappropriate behavior by Trump with anyone.
Maxwell, a British socialite, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted of luring underage girls into sexual favors for Epstein, who committed suicide in a New York prison in 2019 while awaiting trial.
Trump had pledged for months to reveal significant developments in the Epstein case, but the issue became a source of public outrage after the Justice Department announced in early July that it hadn’t uncovered any new evidence that would justify the release of additional documents.
The US president is intensifying efforts to quell the raging controversy surrounding the Epstein case, which has even spread to his electoral base.
Epstein’s death fueled a wave of conspiracy theories that he was assassinated to prevent him from revealing embarrassing details about prominent figures.
Questions grew when the Wall Street Journal published a report in July about Trump’s friendship with Epstein, noting that Trump’s name was among hundreds found during the Justice Department’s review of the case files.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump wrote a sexually suggestive letter to Epstein in 2003 on his 50th birthday, prompting the Republican president to file a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper.
