Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor urged a federal judge to reject a request from two members of Congress to appoint a neutral expert to oversee the public release of documents connected to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, according to a letter filed in the case.
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton told U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer that the judge lacks authority to grant what the lawmakers sought, including the appointment of a neutral expert. Clayton also argued that the congressional cosponsors do not have standing in the criminal case that led to Maxwell’s conviction and sentence.
Clayton’s position was laid out in a letter signed by him, which the judge was told about as the lawmakers pressed their request this week. The request, the letter said, amounted to “extraordinary” relief, and Clayton said Engelmayer should reject it because the congressmen were not parties to the criminal case.
Reps. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, have argued that the Justice Department’s release pace under the Epstein Files Transparency Act is too slow. They described their concerns as urgent and grave, saying the process began last month with only a small number of millions of documents being released.
In a filing, Khanna and Massie said they believed criminal violations had taken place in the document release process. Khanna later said Clayton’s response “misconstrued” the intent of the request, according to the statement included in the AP report.
Khanna said: “We are informing the Court of serious misconduct by the Department of Justice that requires a remedy, one we believe this Court has the authority to provide, and which victims themselves have requested.” He also said their purpose was: “Our purpose is to ensure that DOJ complies with its representations to the Court and with its legal obligations under our law.”
The Justice Department, through Clayton, said it expects to update the court “again shortly” about its progress turning over records from the Epstein and Maxwell investigative files. The department has previously said release has been slowed by redactions it says are required to protect the identities of abuse victims.
Khanna and Massie said the Justice Department has released 12,000 documents out of more than 2 million being reviewed. They wrote that this pace amounts to a “flagrant violation” of the law’s release requirements and has caused “ serious trauma to survivors,” according to their letter to the judge.
In that same filing, they wrote: “Put simply, the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act.” They asked that a court-appointed monitor be given authority to prepare reports about the true nature and extent of the document production and whether improper redactions or conduct have taken place.
The document-release dispute centers on court-related disclosure tied to the Epstein probe and Maxwell’s earlier criminal case. The AP report also notes that Epstein died in August 2019 in a federal jail in New York City while awaiting trial, and that the death was ruled a suicide.