The chairman of the House’s chief investigative committee said on Monday that the Justice Department would miss his panel’s Tuesday subpoena deadline for providing files related to the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein but would begin sharing some records starting Friday.
Representative James R. Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the Oversight Committee, issued the subpoena to Attorney General Pam Bondi this month after a few G.O.P. lawmakers on the panel teamed with Democrats to force his hand. It set an Aug. 19 deadline for the Justice Department to give the committee all of its files related to Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in federal prison while awaiting trial in 2019.
But ahead of his announcement on Monday, Mr. Comer signaled to reporters at the Capitol that he did not expect the Justice Department to meet the deadline, chalking it up to the sheer volume of records it had on Mr. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime associate who is serving a 20-year sentence on sex trafficking charges.
“There are many records in D.O.J.’s custody, and it will take the Department time to produce all the records and ensure the identification of victims and any child sexual abuse material are redacted,” Mr. Comer said in a statement.
Mr. Comer did not provide any details about the timeline for the full release of the files requested by the subpoena, which included material related to the criminal cases against Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell and the investigation into Mr. Epstein’s death.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. But it is expected to provide documents on a rolling basis, which will likely force Republican lawmakers to confront continued questions about the Epstein files that have already plagued them for months.
The House Oversight Committee was required to send a subpoena for the Epstein files after Democrats forced a vote in a key oversight subcommittee last month. A small group of Republicans joined them to back the subpoena, including Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who pushed for a provision that required the Justice Department to redact information about Mr. Epstein’s victims and remove any material that depicted children being sexually abused.
The committee also sent subpoenas to a number of prominent Democratic and Republican officials who held their positions during investigations into Mr. Epstein. On Monday, it held a closed-door deposition with one of those officials, William P. Barr, who was serving as President Trump’s attorney general when Mr. Epstein died.
Outside the deposition, Mr. Comer said that Mr. Barr testified that he had not seen anything that might implicate Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s crimes.
Mr. Comer also said that he would be open to expanding the committee’s inquiry to include other former officials after Democrats pointed to the absence of a subpoena for Alex Acosta, the former labor secretary who resigned over questions about his handling of a case involving Mr. Epstein when Mr. Acosta was a federal prosecutor in Florida.
“We’ll bring in everyone that we think can add information to the investigation,” Mr. Comer said.