After months in which Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to authorize the release of in the hope that the storm would subside on its own, the president of the United States signed the law on Wednesday night that orders its dissemination to his Department of Justice.
He had already announced that he would do so if the law passed through Congress. What no one in Washington counted on was that he would do it, this Tuesday, in such a lightning-fast manner and with such an agreement between both parties. Only one representative, member of the House of Representatives Clay Higgins (Trumpist from Louisiana), voted against the text. The rest, 427 congressmen and 100 senators, supported it, so Trump, who had given authorization to the Republicans on Capitol Hill to support the initiative, was left with few options once the law had landed on his table.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act orders Attorney General Pam Bondi to publish unclassified documents, the organizer of his sex trafficking network and an accomplice in many of his crimes. Bondi, who changed his mind in July about releasing those materials after months of promising to release Epstein’s papers, has 30 days from signing to comply with the order.
This disclosure must be, according to the rule, “systematic” and includes documents in the possession of the Department of Justice. It is a varied and endless collection of files. There are millions of pages, including flight logs, personal communications, internal reports, metadata, immunity agreements, financial employee contracts and emails.
The law approved by Congress, however, includes some exceptions that allow the Department of Justice to reserve information that could turn this new declassification into another chapter in the story of disappointments accumulated in this case by those who want it to be clarified once and for all how far Epstein’s sex trafficking network went and which rich and powerful men participated in it or, at least, had knowledge of the crimes of the pedophile and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. She is serving 20 years in prison in a minimum security prison after collaborating in July
The law requires, in any case, that the published material be easily consulted and downloadable. And it authorizes the Department of Justice to censor information that may be compromising for victims, materials that describe sexual abuse of minors, shocking images or data that may jeopardize an active investigation. Bondi is obliged to justify these censorships and asks Congress for an additional report detailing the content. crossed out within 15 days of publication.
“We will obey the law,” Bondi said three times this Wednesday when asked by reporters. “In the meantime, 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 they were not going to release more materials, the attorney general offered a haphazard response: “There is information, new information, additional information, but, again, we will limit ourselves to obeying.” [lo que diga] The law.” Before that change of mind, and as it was later learned, Bondi had warned Trump in a meeting at the White House that his name appeared “everywhere” in the papers of the millionaire pedophile, with whom he had a friendly relationship for 15 years.
The victims, gathered on Tuesday at the Capitol to accompany the approval of the new law, said they feared that the Trump Administration was going to hand over excessively censored material or that they would cling to the existence of these ongoing investigations. Specifically, those ordered by the President of the United States to Bondi last Friday. Then, he asked him to investigate some of the names that have appeared repeatedly in the papers that have become known over the years.
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