More than two months after she promised to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, Attorney General Pam Bondi explained this week that the sheer volume of pornographic material being reviewed is delaying the process.
“There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn and there are hundreds of victims,” Bondi told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “And no one victim [child’s identity] will ever get released,” she added. “It’s just the volume and that’s what they’re going through right now. The FBI is diligently going through that.”
Bondi’s promise to release the Epstein files came under renewed scrutiny this week after Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that he did not believe the Justice Department still possessed records.
“The attorney general does not have them or she would’ve turned them over. The president ordered them released, the attorney general ordered them released. We all know they have not been released,” Comer told Johnson during an interview that aired Tuesday.
Comer said he suspected that staffers in the Biden Justice Department destroyed relevant documents implicating the political and Hollywood liberals who associated with Epstein.
The Kentucky congressman’s office remained doubtful that the records will ever see the light of day when a reporter asked him about Bondi’s comments.
“Over the years, possible Deep State actors within the DOJ may not have preserved all Epstein documents,” a Comer aide said.
In a bizarre twist, Bondi was caught earlier on hidden camera making the same claim to a private citizen about the FBI reviewing “tens of thousands” of videos related to the Epstein case.
The undercover video, which was submitted to the O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), shows a brief exchange between Bondi and the concerned citizen at a D.C. restaurant on April 28. The woman approached her table and asked, “Do you know when the Epstein files are going to be released?”
Bondi responded: “We hope soon.” When pressed for a more concrete timeline, she explained, “You know what it is? There are tens of thousands of videos, and it’s all with little kids.” During this exchange, Bondi didn’t appear to refer to Epstein as the sole perpetrator as she did on May 7.
The AG added: “That’s where they’ve [the Department of Justice] been working. People don’t understand, but that’s what they’ve been working on going through.”
According to O’Keefe, OMG contacted Bondi’s office on May 1st to request comment on recording, but “no formal response was provided.”
The conservative muckraker accused Bondi of echoing her April 28 private remarks “nearly word for word” in front of reporters this week “in a damage control effort.”
Bondi vowed to release the Epstein files back in February, noting that the records would include “a lot of flight logs, a lot of names.” In a public relations disaster the next day at the White House however, a handful of conservative influencers were given binders of documents that consisted mainly of previously released materials that offered little new information.
Conservatives were quick to lambast Bondi for what they saw as a PR stunt gone wrong.
“They embarrassed themselves. They stepped on a rake for no apparent reason,” independent journalist and YouTuber Megyn Kelly said at the time. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck wrote on social media: “The Epstein files are a total joke. Who is subverting POTUS?”
Bondi accused the FBI’s New York field office of withholding thousands of pages of files and ordered FBI director Kash Patel to conduct an immediate investigation into the matter.
“Late yesterday, l learned from a source that the FBI Field Office in New York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein,” she wrote in a letter to Patel on February 27. “Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of the files.”
The Epstein case burst back into the news last month with the apparent suicide of Virginia Giuffre, who had provided key testimony on Epstein’s sex-trafficking network. Giuffre sued Epstein’s friend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell for defamation in 2015, leading to the unsealing of damning court documents four years later.
The day after the first batch of documents from Giuffre’s suit were released to the public on August 9, 2019, further implicating Epstein, Maxwell, and others, Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell.
During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) questioned Patel about Epstein’s death.
“Did Jeffrey Epstein hang himself or did somebody kill him?” Kennedy asked.
“Senator, I believe he hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center,” Patel answered. The FBI Director said all the information on that case would be released by the Department of Justice “in the near future.”
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and offenses related to Epstein at a correctional facility in Tallahassee, Florida.
Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. Attorney in Florida who oversaw Epstein’s much criticized plea deal in 2008, reportedly told Trump officials in 2017 during his vetting for an administration post that he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald posted on X Wednesday that he took Bondi at her word that the FBI was reviewing Epstein’s sex videos, but added that she should reveal if Epstein had any ties to the government.
“I’m sure it’s true, as Pam Bondi says, that the FBI has a lot of sex videos of Epstein with children or child porn,” he wrote. “I don’t think people care much about those. We should, however, find out—and quickly—if Epstein worked with or for any specific intelligence agencies.”
Investigative journalist Whitney Webb said in a recent interview that Epstein’s financial crimes, which were significant, and involved a lot of elite American families often gets overlooked.
“He was kept around by elite figures because he was very good at helping them evade taxes, was very good at money laundering and had a very very intimate knowledge of the offshore banking system where a lot of these families historically hide their money,” she said.