New congressional task force weighs declassifying Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘client list’ and other government secrets
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A new congressional task force is weighing whether to release a slew of national secrets – and Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list” could be among the documents declassified.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced the establishment of the investigative unit Tuesday. Republican Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna will lead the task force that will decide whether to publish materials related to federal government interests and “end an era of secrecy,” the lawmaker said.
Luna, a fierce Donald Trump supporter who is lobbying to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore, said that along with releasing the disgraced financier’s contact list, her team will investigate the September 11 terrorist attacks, the origins of Covid-19, the assassinations of former President John F Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and UFOs.
“This will be a relentless pursuit of truth and transparency and we will not stop until the American people have the answers they deserve,” the congresswoman said. “We will cut through the bureaucracy, challenge the stonewalling, and ensure the American people finally get the truth they have been denied for too long.”
Eleven letters were issued to top U.S. security and intelligence officials, with one addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi requesting a briefing by no later than next Tuesday regarding “what documents (if any) are in your possession regarding the investigation into and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein.”
It is not clear whether the client list differentiates from Epstein’s previously released black book which includes high-profile figures including former U.S. president Bill Clinton, tech stalwart Bill Gates, and the president himself. None of those previously listed have ever been accused of any wrongdoing.
Luna said she would be opening the task force to both Republicans and Democrats, and the congresswoman said a first hearing would be held in March.
The announcement follows Trump’s signing an executive order last month pledging to declassify records surrounding the assassinations of JFK, Senator Robert F Kennedy and Dr Martin Luther King – a move which prompted calls for the president to release the pedophile’s elusive list.
“This task force serves to build on President Trump’s actions,” Comer said Tuesday. “For far too long, the American people have had reasonable questions of what their government, which they fund every day, keeps hidden about certain issues. And for far too long, the federal government has not answered these questions.”
However, at least one GOP lawmaker cast doubts over the client list being released, after calling the FBI – which said Tuesday it had found 2,400 new pages of documents about the JFK assassination – as “crooked as a dog leg.”
“I don’t think we’re… no, just no,” Tennessee Representative and Republcian Tim Burchett said on Newsnation’s CUOMO on Tuesday evening. “I’m on the committee, I’m going to go into it open-minded, but all of a sudden, these agencies are going to do what’s right, and I just don’t buy it.”
Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on new charges of trafficking teenage girls. In 2021 his former girlfriend, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted for her role in recruiting underage victims and serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Trump and Epstein, friends since the late 1980s, occasionally flew together from LaGuardia to Palm Peach, Florida, where both men lived, and were pictured partying together at Mar-a-Lago.
Flight logs released by prosecutors in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial show Trump flew with Epstein on his private jet, a Boeing 727 called “Lolita Express” numerous times, with the president’s former wife Marla Maples and his children Eric and Tiffany Trump, as well as a beauty queen and a senior aide to Bill Clinton.
Epstein used the plane to ferry young women between New York and Epstein’s primary residence in Palm Beach, where many of his alleged acts of sexual abuse are said to have taken place.
“We know he [Clinton] was on the plane, called the Lolita Express, multiple times. He has been a continued friend of his for many years,” Pam Bondi, Trump’s newly appointed attorney-general, told Fox News last week – though Clinton has denied the claim.
“Contrast that with Donald Trump, who had not spoken to him for over a decade after he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago for bad behavior.”
The pair had a falling out over a real estate dispute in the 1990s, years before Epstein’s first arrest for soliciting prostitution in 2006, and Trump has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s abuse.
“I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” he said in the Oval Office the day after New York authorities took Epstein into custody in July 2019.
In September, the president told podcaster Lex Friedman that he never visited Epstein’s private Little St James in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
When Friedan pushed about Trump showing “some hesitation” about releasing the Epstein files, he replied: “I don’t think – I mean, I’m not involved… I never went to his island, fortunately, but a lot of people did.”
