The Department of Justice is still withholding most of the long-awaited documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case, one month after the congressionally mandated deadline to release all of the files.
January 19 marks one month since the December 19 deadline in the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed and while Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie — the pair of lawmakers who spearheaded the legislation — continue to pursue the documents, others appear to be growing weary of the saga.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department has so far published just over 12,000 of the more than 2 million documents it must release in the case of the sex offender, who died by suicide in a New York jail cell in August 2019.
Some Republicans who forced a vote to release the records in November are largely staying silent on the issue, as attention turns to unrest in Minneapolis over Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity, President Donald Trump’s ousting of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and his pursuit of acquiring the Danish territory of Greenland.
“I don’t give a rip about Epstein,” GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado told Politico.
“Like, there’s so many other things we need to be working on,” she added. “I’ve done what I had to do for Epstein.”
Boebert said the matter was “no longer in my hands” and urged the outlet to “talk to somebody else about that” after she was one of the four House Republicans who forced the vote on the legislation.
The Trump administration tried to dissuade Republicans from forcing the vote and Boebert was at one point called to the Situation Room over the matter.
Former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was also part of the group of rebel Republicans, culminating in a public fallout with President Donald Trump, who branded her a “traitor.”
Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who has worked on an investigation into the Epstein case alongside Democrats on a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Politico that the December 19 deadline was “not realistic.”
“I’m not going to rush the process on that,” Luna said. “We’re going to get them.”
And while she did not explicitly mention Epstein, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace appeared to criticize the process Monday in a post on X.
“The First Amendment does not permit courts to silence victims to protect predators from embarrassment,” said Mace, who was one of the four Republicans to force the House vote on the Epstein files legislation.
Massie, meanwhile, asked why the Trump administration was “working harder to hide the Epstein files than prior administrations did to cover up Iran-Contra and Watergate?”
The case consumed the Trump administration for much of 2025 after Bondi’s department and the FBI said in July that no further documents would be published and ruled out the existence of a “client list.” That was after Trump campaigned on releasing the files and Bondi once said they were sitting on her desk.
President Donald Trump’s MAGA base was enraged and the issue continued to dog the administration for the rest of the year.
Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein, and has long distanced himself from the disgraced financier.
Earlier this month, Massie and Khanna asked a federal court to appoint a special master to oversee the document release and claimed the Justice Department “cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the act.” The department fired back in a letter that said the lawmakers “do not have standing” to make such a request.
Bondi wrote to a pair of federal judges on January 15 and said hundreds of staff are reviewing the files and holding calls every day, but she noted some “glitches” have marred the release.
“The Department has made substantial progress and remains focused on releasing materials under the [Epstein Files Transparency Act] promptly while protecting victim privacy,” Bondi wrote in the letter.
More than 500 reviewers are going over millions of pages of material to prepare the Epstein files for release and protect confidentiality, she added.
Part of the effort, Bondi continued, requires processing and “deduplicating” decades of documents using a central platform.
“Due to the scope of this effort, platform operations require around-the-clock attention and technical assistance to resolve inevitable glitches due to the sheer volume of materials,” Bondi said.
Observers were alarmed to see a photo from Epstein’s office that showed pictures of Trump inside a drawer. The image was temporarily taken down from the public portal, but later reinstated.
Critics alleged the department was covering evidence of Trump’s long association with Epstein, but the Justice Department dismissed those allegations and said it temporarily removed the image over unrelated safety concerns.
Josh Marcus contributed reporting
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