Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the FBI on Thursday to provide her with what she said were “thousands of pages” of documents that the FBI New York Field Office was allegedly withholding from her related to disgraced businessman Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking case.
Bondi wrote in a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel, which was shared on social media by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), that the New York office had provided Bondi with 200 pages of Epstein-related documents.
The documents in Bondi’s possession “consisted primarily of flight logs, Epstein’s list of contacts, and a list of victims’ names and phone numbers,” Bondi wrote.
The attorney general demanded Patel provide her with the “full and complete Epstein files” by Friday morning. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment about Bondi’s letter.
Some Republicans, including Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), have been building anticipation about unreleased files related to Epstein, and Bondi said during a television interview this week that the files included a “lot of flight logs, a lot of names … a lot of information, but it’s pretty sick what that man did.”
The Trump administration invited several right-wing influencers to the White House to receive hard copies of an apparent “phase 1” of an Epstein document dump before the administration made them available to the public.
The influencers included a woman behind the account Libs of TikTok, Mike Cernovich, and a man behind the account DC_Draino. It is unclear what portion of the documents contain fresh information about Epstein’s case.
Epstein was indicted in the Southern District of New York in 2019 over allegations that he recruited dozens of women and minor girls as young as 14, engaged in sexual relations with them, and sexually abused some of them at his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida, and elsewhere.
Epstein died before his trial, but his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was later convicted of conspiring to sexually abuse minors and sentenced to 22 years in prison.
In court filings, Prince Andrew of the British Royal Family, as well as former President Bill Clinton, President Donald Trump, former Vice President Al Gore, the late singer Michael Jackson, and former Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz all had ties to Epstein. Despite their associations with Epstein, most have not been accused of criminal conduct aside from Prince Andrew, who has denied any wrongdoing but settled a lawsuit with an alleged victim.
Jeffrey Epstein was found unresponsive in his prison cell on the morning of Aug. 10, 2019. A U.S. attorney said Epstein was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. A New York City medical examiner determined Epstein had hanged himself.
But mystery clouded Epstein’s death after another expert disputed the medical examiner and after revelations that the jail had malfunctioning surveillance cameras and that Epstein had been taken off suicide watch days before his death.
BONDI TO RELEASE JEFFREY EPSTEIN FILES ON THURSDAY
A forensic pathologist named Dr. Michael Baden, who was hired by Epstein’s brother, later said in an interview on Fox & Friends that he believed the fractures in Epstein’s neck were more consistent with “homicidal strangulation” than suicidal hanging.
However, the FBI and DOJ inspector general found no evidence of criminality tied to Epstein’s death. The IG report revealed that a top contributing factor in his death was that the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center had gravely mismanaged its facility, where Epstein was being detained.
“The combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures documented in the report all contributed to an environment in which arguably one of the most notorious inmates in BOP’s custody was provided with the opportunity to take his own life,” the inspector general said.