(Washington) It was the rallying cry of Donald Trump’s base: “Publish the Epstein file.” By Friday at the latest, after months of delaying tactics, the Republican administration will have to keep this promise, under duress from Congress.
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The death of Jeffrey Epstein, found hanging in his cell in New York on August 10, 2019 before his trial for sex crimes, has fueled countless conspiracy theories that he was murdered to cover up a scandal involving high-profile figures.
After campaigning on the promise of shocking revelations, the Republican president took his supporters on the wrong foot by urging them to turn the page, now describing the affair as a “hoax” exploited by his Democratic adversaries.
But, unable to prevent Congress from adopting a law aimed at providing greater transparency in this matter, Donald Trump had to promulgate it on November 19. The law gives the government 30 days to comply, until December 19 at the latest.
It requires the Department of Justice to publish all of the unclassified documents in its possession on the late New York financier, his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, and all people involved in the legal proceedings.
These include documents from the proceedings leading to Jeffrey Epstein’s conviction to a little over a year in prison in 2008 in Florida, after a particularly lenient agreement with the prosecution, as well as his federal indictment in New York in 2019 for more serious charges of sexual exploitation of minors.
Also affected are all entities, private or public, linked to the activities of Jeffrey Epstein, including non-criminal ones, as well as the flight plans and passenger lists of all vehicles that belonged to him.
Neither “client list” nor blackmail
The extent of the revelations to be expected from this publication remains unknown.
Especially since in July, the Department of Justice and the FBI, the federal police, announced in a memorandum, after examining more than 300 gigabytes of data, that they had discovered no new element that would justify the publication of additional documents.
In rendering these conclusions which had ignited the powder within the Trumpist MAGA camp, the judicial authorities had confirmed the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein and claimed to have found neither “client list” of his sexual exploitation network, nor “credible evidence that he had blackmailed powerful people”.
But even without legal consequences, the expected documents could embarrass a number of personalities, particularly from the world of business, politics, or entertainment, who gravitated in the financier’s orbit. Including Donald Trump, long close to Jeffrey Epstein, until their falling out in the 2000s.
The billionaire, who was also a figure of the New York jet set at the time, has always denied having any knowledge of his criminal behavior and claims to have broken up with him well before he was concerned by the courts. A chronology that these documents could call into question.
One week before the deadline, Democratic elected officials published on Friday a new series of photos in which we see Jeffrey Epstein in the company of former Democratic President Bill Clinton, successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Richard Branson, or even the filmmaker Woody Allen.
Donald Trump also appears there, in the company of women with obscured faces.
“The Trump administration has done more for Epstein’s victims than Democrats have ever done, releasing thousands of pages of documents and calling for new investigations into Epstein’s Democratic friends,” responded a White House spokesperson.
The Democrats, for their part, are worried about possible manipulation of the file before its publication.
Two Democratic senators thus demanded in an open letter to the inspector general of the Department of Justice an “independent audit” within a month, to guarantee that nothing was “neither manipulated nor concealed”.
