By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and STEPHEN GROVES, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Oversight Committee voted Wednesday to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to answer questions over the Justice Department’s handling of files regarding the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation.
Five Republicans joined Democrats to support the subpoena proposed by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina in a sign of continued frustration among conservatives with the department’s review and release of a tranche of documents related to the disgraced financier. The move amounted to a sharp rebuke of Bondi by Republicans who have been clamoring for information about Epstein’s abuse of young girls and his interactions with rich and powerful people.
“The American people want answers on the Epstein files, and so do we,” Mace said in a post on X.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment on the subpoena.
The Epstein files remain a political headache for the Trump administration more than a year after Bondi sparked backlash by handing out binders of documents to conservative influencers at the White House that included no bombshells.
Bondi has defended the department’s handling of the files and has accused Democrats of using the Epstein files to distract from Trump’s successes, although some of the most vocal criticism has come from members of the president’s own party.
Former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, recently sat with lawmakers on the committee for their own depositions over the former Democratic president’s connections to Epstein from more than two decades ago.
After raising the expectations of conservatives with promises of transparency last year, the Justice Department said in July that it had concluded a review and determined that no Epstein “client list” existed and there was no reason to make additional files public. That set off a furor that prompted Congress to pass legislation demanding that the Justice Department release the files.
The Justice Department said last week that it was looking into whether it had improperly withheld documents from the files after several news organizations reported that some records involving uncorroborated accusations made by a woman against Trump were not among those released to the public.
That announcement followed news reports saying that a massive tranche of records released by the Justice Department did not include several summaries of interviews that the FBI conducted with an unidentified woman who came forward after Epstein’s 2019 arrest and claimed to have been sexually assaulted by both Trump and Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s.
