SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – “There’s just so many redactions and blackouts,” CBS News Reporter Christopher Cruise told KCBS Radio about this weekend’s dump of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. “At some point, you think you’re going to be able to read those, and they’re just going to have to justify those redactions.”
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Now, at the end of year when Epstein’s name has been splashed across headlines (years after the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender’s death) the U.S. Department of Justice began releasing files. Previously, Attorney General and other federal officials announce in a joint memorandum that no further files would be released.
That announcement came with significant backlash both from Democrats and Republicans, including President Donald Trump’s MAGA base. As the year went on, Trump continued to downplay the Epstein files issue and his former ties to the man, who was known to cultivate connections with rich and powerful people. It eventually even caused former fervent Trump supporter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to break off from the president.
House committees released photos and documents about Epstein ahead of the DOJ info dump. While it contains thousands of files, some of those who were calling for the information to be released. They include U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) who teamed up for a bipartisan effort to get the information released.
Massie said last month that he was concerned the Trump administration would use new investigations into Epstein as a way to avoid releasing the files.
“He’s working, as am I, on drafting Articles of Impeachment and Inherent Contempt,” Khanna told CNN Friday, referring to his work with Massie to potentially impeach Bondi. “We haven’t decided whether to move it forward yet, but we’re in the process of doing it. And look, the problem the attorney general has – if you just look at the comments to her social media feed – is the amount of MAGA, MAGA influencers who are upset with her.”
“Attorney General Pam Bondi is withholding specific documents that the law required her to release by today,” said Massie in an X post. In another, he said: “A future DOJ could convict the current AG and others because the Epstein Files Transparency Act is not like a Congressional Subpoena which expires at the end of each Congress.”
Khanna told CNN that the decision on whether to impeach the attorney general will be based on support. He added that he and Massie don’t want to make a move “just for the show of it.”
What they really want is for the DOJ to “actually start releasing these documents,” Khanna explained. He added that the Friday release was “in no way complying with the spirit of the law.”
Cruise and his team at CBS were digging through the release when he joined KCBS Radio for a Friday interview. He called it the “mother of all of all Friday night news dumps,” and noted that it included photos of girls with passages from the book “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov (narrated by pedophile predator Humbert Humbert) written on their bodies, photos with former President Bill Clinton, with Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger, with newsman Walter Cronkite and with pop stars Michel Jackson and Diana Ross.
“I have to say though, like there’s no smoking gun here… so far about Donald Trump – his name or image. They have not surfaced in any meaningful way,” Cruise said.
Photos of Trump and Epstein have already been circulating online, including a new photo included in a House photo dump last weekend. Trump has admitted to knowing Epstein but said they had not spoken since the early 2000s by the time of Epstein’s 2019 death in a jail cell.
Cruise said there were large chunks of redacted material in the Friday release.
“Over the next days and weeks, DOJ is going to be releasing a lot more files. But it’s also true that within about two weeks, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, has got to provide Congress with a summary of just what the redactions were and the legal basis for those admissions,” he explained. “So we may not see what’s redacted, but she has to say why they were redacted.”
As for legal action related to the release, Cruise said the DOJ has claimed it is trying to protect people who were minors by withholding some items from release. Cruise also said he believes the release will be complicated for the victims, filled with both relief and potential stress.
“I think it’s going to be very, very traumatic,” Cruise told KCBS. “It may be something that, like I said, they’ve been fighting for for a long time, and they may be relieved by this, but I think there’s going be terrible, terrible heartache on their part.”