Transcription
The Epstein files are due Friday, December 19th, and either we are going to see them or there is going to be one heck of a fight about it. I'm Ari Melber, lawyer journalist. You can subscribe to my YouTube breakdowns.
This video is going to break down exactly what is required under the new federal law, the Epstein Transparency Act, and what we should expect to see. So, let's get right to it.
This law is different and stronger than some so-called transparency requirements because it immediately demands the government, in this case largely the Trump DOJ, release these materials online altogether Friday. There are some uh understandable exceptions like protecting victims and I'll talk about that in a sec. But the main thing here is this is not one of those reports that goes to Congress and then gets fought over or redacted or diluted over there in the political branch. This stuff is supposed to come right out.
So, let me read to you uh from the law itself. There's been a lot of talk about Epstein and this fight and what could happen. But the bottom line here, and it's kind of interesting because if you remember fights about say the Müller report or or past u investigative reports from the DOJ, there is often a process where they finish the stuff, then they hand the stuff over to Congress or they review it internally in DOJ. Okay. So, the prosecutor finishes it, hands it up to the attorney general or over to Congress, and then there's a delay or a debate about what comes out and how much.
Here, the law is stronger. It says no later than 30 days after this law, which is Friday, December 19th, the attorney general, because it requires the DOJ's leader, the attorney general, to execute this, quote, must make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of DOJ, including the FBI, which is technically a branch of DOJ, and US attorney's offices at that relate to and then it lists uh bunch of categories. I've done actually a different video breaking down those categories which is the substance things like the Epstein investigation, the Maxwell investigation, what happened with Epstein's death, flight records. So there's a bunch of stuff in there that's breaking down the topics but the global point here and this is se uh section two it's called release of the documents relating to Epstein is that they have to come out in public Friday.
So either the DOJ does that shows that it's trying to do that. All documents, most documents, people can debate it, but there's a a pretty understandable set of materials of interest here and Congress is the one requiring it and they made Trump sign it when he lost that big clash. So either they drop that by the end of Friday night and show that they're complying in some sense or they don't they don't meaningfully comply or they only drop say really old documents or highly redacted documents well beyond what's reasonable then they would be breaking the law and we can talk about that step two of what happens what Congress can do. But that's the headline on the material coming out Friday.
When you look at then what it could be exempted for or redacted for, what's been really interesting is this law supersedes past laws that provide other secrecy. Grand juries are typically secret. That's federal law. There's a federal rule six that's been in operation for decades. And one question was, okay, you pass a new law that says more sunlight, but what about old laws that say less sunlight? How do you uh how do you adjudicate that? That's how how you know lawyers put it. And we now have an answer on that that we didn't have when the law first passed about, you know, just last month. Three different judges have ruled that this new law is the winner and this higher transparency, more sunlight rule beats the past secrecy rules. You can get into why because judges reason that the new law is more sweeping, that it supersedes the old law, that if laws are in conflict, I'm simplifying because sometimes it depends, but the new law usually, if specifically written, overrules the old one.
So you might say that there's a federal rule that says all grand juries are secret in the United States except except for those of sex trafficker Epstein and his convicted conspirator Maxwell. That alone is a is actually a big change. Uh most laws are written universally uniformly. So you get taxed at this rate or that rate. You have grand jury protections for everybody. Uh what the government has done here under this unusually bipartisan huge ongoing pressure and what the survivors did speaking out and building pressure and Trump having broken his vow he said he would release and he didn't all the things we live through what what Congress has done is basically changed this and said yes grand jury secrecy usually and it's usually a good thing for all these reasons but not for this this is too important and there's been too much cover up and too many valid questions around the sex trafficking and the pedophilia so that's a big change and I mention that here because that means that there's all these grand jury materials that are supposed to come out.
And one sign that the DOJ or some people inside the Bondi DOJ are trying to comply, which is what they have to do, what they're supposed to do under the law, is they've gone to three separate judges about this. And all three have ruled in agreement that the new law allows the release of the grand jury materials, not that the that there's a caveat or an exception there that you would redact all the grand jury materials. Now, in some cases, if there was a trial like Maxwell, the grand jury materials are basically, think of that as the rough draft or the beginning of that trial, but we've had a whole public trial, so there may not be a ton of new really important secret info in there.
In the Epstein case, though, the grand jury materials could have all kinds of leads about how they built the evidence against him, what that trial was going to look like, because the public never saw it because he died in prison under suspicious circumstances. The government ruled it uh suicide and there was a coroner and there was a report. Uh but Congress on a bipartisan basis clearly wants more info about that. So that's also a question and those grand jury materials, in other words, think of it as the first draft or the start of the Epstein case and trial that we never got. Uh could be important.
As for the exceptions, they are basically the way lawyers say this is narrowly tailored. Uh they're not supposed to be exceptions to black out whole pages or pull materials. Uh I'm just looking at some notes I made. Uh for example, they get ahead of the idea of oh the government trying to cover up its tracks. Whether that's how the Trump DOJ handled this recently or the Biden Garland DOJ in the previous four years, they had documents. They didn't release them. They didn't do transparency. Then the law says that the no withholding or redacting is allowed for quote to avoid embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity. And I'll talk about in a minute how that could tee up for a court fight if they the Congress thinks that uh Bondi is breaking that.
Um there are categories allowed for exceptions and most of them make sense. Remember it's been Congress that pushed for the transparency. The government DOJ has been fighting against it but these are the exceptions provided by the Congress that wants materials. Nothing about child victims or medical information about them. That's standard. Um you can't in jeopardize an active federal investigation. Bondi said this was totally closed. She wasn't looking into blackmail or any other cases. So if she changes that raises the question of was she lying then or now. Um but it would be I I think legally standard to say yeah if there's an open probe you don't want to mess that up with disclosures.
Um material that's classified is not covered by this act. And that is again I mentioned that the grand jury exception is here. They're going to get more than usual. But that kind of honors or or continues the precedent that obviously things that are classified stay classified. They have to be declassified by the executive. And we don't know what we don't know. If there are huge parts of this case that do involve classified material legitimately, then they may stay classified, foreign governments, espionage, whatever it may be. Um, but we under the rules will find out after Friday.
Friday is the deadline to drop everything online searchable database. Two weeks after that, because Congress put this on a fast timeline, DOJ also has to specify, and you may have may have heard less about this, but DOJ has to specify anything that they did withhold or redact as a category. So, that's important because again, it will give them tools to oversee whether this was done in a real valid way, and if not, to go to court about it. So if there's for example 80 pages that are classified and held back because they relate to foreign governments again hypothetical or some other classified reason national security they still two weeks later have to tell Congress that and then you can debate it. So those are the narrow categories for the exceptions. The rest of the material is supposed to basically drop online.
Uh and if you're saying okay is this going to work? There have been past examples that have worked. Uh the church committee way back in the 70s was dealing with government abuse and surveillance abuse, abuse of national security powers and over time they extracted a lot of stuff that was secret and classified and some of it off the books unlawful basically uh and they got it out in the public realm. There was a JFK records law as well that over time demanded things and then I could point you to other examples. The 9/11 report uh was heralded for what it said, but there were big parts that were redacted and were fought over for what it didn't say. And so we will just have to watch and I don't think people are going to tune this out. There's tremendous public interest political pressure on whether DOJ under Trump complies or not.
Uh and that leads me to a final quick conclusion here which is if you say that okay a lot comes out everyone weeds through it like I said it's got to be online searchable under the law that means by Friday midnight you get the material. If they only put up really redacted things, old things or nothing, if they completely defy it, then Congress can take this administration to court. And on the one hand, you can say, "Oh, well, will that take forever and this whole thing drags out?" And that's one of the problems with the way government can work. On the other hand, they made Trump sign this. He lost that big fight. A lot of Republicans now want to keep the heat either on him or away from themselves in Congress. So, there's political pressure. The courts have also been very quick to act as I mentioned in those three different grand jury cases.
So you could imagine getting before a court pretty quickly. Let's say there is a fight either they didn't release or release what Congress says is enough. And by January you're in court and they can issue just as the courts have issued subpoenas which is how we got some of those Epstein emails that were secret and the other photos. A court can issue a subpoena to DOJ the way they did to the Epstein estate. And there are lawyers there who have to comply with a lawful subpoena unless they defeat it on appeal. So if they don't comply Friday or comply in a way that Congress thinks is valid, you could end up in court and you could quickly have a high stakes court battles where people are asking if Trump supports this, why is he fighting it, why is he holding it back and being secret again, dragging that all out and b you could have binding orders that a heck of a lot of lawyers at DOJ would rather comply with than lose their career or law license over. Uh so that's what we're looking at as we track this deadline. Uh you can always subscribe for my breakdowns. Stay informed.