By Alana Durkin-Richer and Eric Tucker
Washington (AP)Despite Attorney General Pam Bondit’s assurances that no more documents pertaining to the affluent financier’s sex trafficking investigation would be released to the public, the Justice Department admitted on Monday that Jeffrey Epstein did not keep a client list, which had heightened the expectations of conservative influencers and conspiracy theorists.
In a Fox News interview earlier this year, Bondi implied that such a document was on my desk ready for release. The admission that the well-connected Epstein did not have a list of clients to whom underage girls were trafficked represents a public retraction of a theory that the Trump administration had assisted in promoting.
In a document, the agency stated that it was not releasing additional evidence investigators had gathered, even as it released video taken inside a New York jail that was intended to provide conclusive evidence that Epstein committed suicide. For weeks, Bondi has hinted that more information will be made public. At one time, she claimed that a first document dump she had hypnotized infuriated President Donald Trump’s base by not delivering disclosures, but now that a new government has taken office, everything will be made public.
Far-right influencers have criticized and mocked Bondi in response to that episode, in which conservative online personalities were invited to the White House in February and given binders labeled The Epstein Files: Phase 1 and Declassified, which contained documents that were essentially already in the public domain.
Officials were pouring over a truckload of previously suppressed evidence that Bondi claimed the FBI had turned over after the initial release failed. “Sadly, these people don’t believe in transparency, but I think more unfortunately, I think a lot of them don’t believe in honesty,” she said in a March TV appearance, claiming the Biden administration sat on these documents and did nothing with them.
However, the Justice Department concluded that no more disclosure would be appropriate or necessary following a months-long evaluation of the government’s available material, according to the document. According to the police, just a small portion of the data would have been made public had Epstein been tried since a court sealed off a large portion of it to protect the victims.
Although the FBI and Justice Department logos were on the two-page memo, no official signed it.
According to the memo, stopping child abuse and providing victims with justice are among our top goals. Continuing erroneous assumptions about Epstein accomplishes neither of those goals.
Conservatives who are looking for evidence of a government cover-up of Epstein’s death and activities were incensed at the department’s stance on Monday. Jack Posobiec, a far-right figure, wrote: We were all informed that there will be more. that solutions were available and will be given. It’s amazing how badly this Epstein problem has been handled. It didn’t have to be, either.
Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist, stated that the DOJ will next declare In actuality, Jeffrey Epstein never existed, which makes it excessively disgusting. In an attempt to poke fun of Bondi for claiming that the client list doesn’t exist despite implying months prior that it was on her desk, Elon Musk posted a number of pictures of a clown doing makeup.
Photographs and over 10,000 videos and images that officials claim show child sex abuse or other pornographic content are among the evidence the Justice Department claims to have. Bondi had previously implied that the FBI’s need to examine tens of thousands of tapes that she said depicted Epstein with minors or child porn was a contributing factor in the postponement of the release of more Epstein documents.
Last week, an article concerning the unresolved issues surrounding those recordings was released by the Associated Press.
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Several individuals involved in Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal prosecutions told AP that they had not seen or heard of a treasure trove of recordings similar to the ones Bondi had mentioned. Additionally, neither Epstein nor Maxwell were charged with possessing child sex abuse material, despite the fact that it would have been simpler for prosecutors to prove that than the sex trafficking charges they were facing. Indictments and detention documents also do not claim the presence of video recordings.
Although attorneys engaged in that case stated that a protective order prohibits them from learning the nature of that evidence, the AP did locate mention of the Epstein estate’s discovery of tapes and images that might be considered child sex abuse material in a filing in a civil complaint.
A comprehensive list of inquiries from AP on the tapes Bondi was referring to was not answered by the Justice Department.
The document from Monday doesn’t specify when or where they were obtained, what they show, or whether they were discovered recently as investigators searched through their evidence or if the government has known for a while that they were in its possession.
Weeks after being arrested on sex trafficking allegations, Epstein committed suicide and was discovered dead in his jail cell in August 2019, preventing a trial.
Although conspiracy theorists have continued to contest that judgment, the department’s statement that Epstein committed suicide is scarcely a revelation.
For example, in an interview with the AP in 2019, then-Attorney General William Barr stated that he had personally examined security footage showing that no one had entered the area where Epstein was kept the night before he died. Barr came to the conclusion that Epstein’s suicide was the consequence of a series of mistakes.
In more recent television and podcast interviews, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have maintained that there is ample proof Epstein committed suicide.
