The House Oversight Committee voted Wednesday to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the DOJ’s handling of the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and its compliance with a law requiring all documents related to the disgraced financier to be released.
The bipartisan 24-19 vote came amid growing criticism of the Justice Department’s handling of the case and its failure to release all of Epstein’s files, with the vote following a motion introduced by South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace.
While Mace introduced the proposal, all Democrats voted for it, as did GOP Reps. Tim Burchett (Tennessee), Michael Cloud (Texas), Lauren Boebert (Colorado) and Scott Perry (Pennsylvania), according to an Axios report.
“Our motions to subpoena the Congressional Workplace Rights Office AND AG Pam Bondi BOTH PASSED the Oversight Committee,” Bondi wrote on X shortly after the vote, adding that the Congressional Workplace Rights Office would release any taxpayer-funded settlements for congressional wrongdoing.
Mace also added that during her deposition, Bondi would have to testify about the “missing Epstein evidence,” which she accused the Justice Department of “covering up.”
“Millions” of documents “hidden” by the Department of Justice
The Republican-backed move to subpoena Bondi came hours after Mace lashed out at the US attorney general on social media.
“AG Bondi claims DOJ released all Epstein files. The record is clear: they didn’t,” Mace wrote on X earlier that day.
“The Epstein case is one of the biggest cover-ups in American history. His global sex-trafficking network is bigger than it lets on. Three million documents have been released and we still don’t have the whole truth. Videos are missing. Audio is missing. Records are missing. There are millions of other documents out there,” the South Carolina lawmaker added, adding that “the American people deserve answers, the victims deserve justice.”
The vote to subpoena Bondi comes after a delay in releasing the Epstein files, with Donald Trump’s Justice Department announcing it would withhold millions of pages of files.
After releasing more than 3 million documents in late January, the Justice Department said it would not release the rest of the Epstein files, which total more than 2.5 million documents.
Further, the Justice Department has also been accused of deleting some files by some members of Congress who had access to unredacted versions of the documents, Axios reported.
The development comes months after Congress passed the Epstein Transparency Act in November with near-unanimous support, requiring the Justice Department to release all its files on the disgraced financier.
