The Home Oversight Committee subpoenaed the property of the late Jeffrey Epstein on Monday as congressional lawmakers attempt to decide who was linked to the disgraced financier and whether or not prosecutors mishandled his case.
The committee’s subpoena is the newest effort by each Republicans and Democrats to reply to public clamor for extra disclosure within the investigation into Epstein, who was discovered lifeless in his New York jail cell in 2019. Lawmakers are attempting to information an investigation into who amongst Epstein’s high-powered social circle could have been conscious of his sexual abuse of teenage women, delving right into a prison case that has spurred conspiracy theories and roiled high officers in President Donald Trump’s administration.
The subpoena, signed by Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the oversight committee, and dated Monday, calls for that Epstein’s property present Congress with paperwork together with a e-book that was compiled with notes from buddies for his fiftieth birthday, his final will and testomony, agreements he signed with prosecutors, his contact books, and his monetary transactions and holdings.
Comer wrote to the executors of Epstein’s property that the committee “is reviewing the potential mismanagement of the federal authorities’s investigation of Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s demise, the operation of sex-trafficking rings and methods for the federal authorities to successfully fight them, and potential violations of ethics guidelines associated to elected officers.”
The Justice Division, attempting to distance Trump and Epstein, final week started handing over to lawmakers documentation of the federal investigation into Epstein. It has additionally launched transcripts of interviews performed with Ghislaine Maxwell, his former girlfriend. However Democrats on the committee haven’t been glad with these efforts, saying that the some 33,000 pages of paperwork they’ve obtained are largely already public.
“DOJ’s restricted disclosure raises extra questions than solutions and makes clear that the White Home shouldn’t be focused on justice for the victims or the reality,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the highest Democrat on the Home Oversight Committee, stated in a press release.
Stress from lawmakers to launch extra data is more likely to solely develop when Congress returns to Washington subsequent week.
A bipartisan group of Home members is making an attempt to maneuver round Republican management to carry a vote to move laws meant to require the Justice Division to launch a full accounting of the intercourse trafficking investigation into Epstein.