Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, urged his colleagues on Monday to take legal action over the Justice Department’s incremental and heavily redacted release of records pertaining to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Schumer introduced a resolution that, if passed, would direct the Senate to file or join lawsuits aimed at forcing the Justice Department to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted last month that required disclosure of records by last Friday.
“Instead of transparency, the Trump administration released a tiny fraction of the files and blacked out massive portions of what little they provided,” Schumer said in a statement. “This is a blatant cover-up.”
In lieu of Republican support, Schumer’s resolution is largely symbolic. The Senate is off until January 5, more than two weeks after the deadline. Even then, it is likely to face an uphill battle for passage. But it allows Democrats to continue a pressure campaign for disclosure that Republicans had hoped to put behind them.
The Justice Department said it plans to release records on a rolling basis by the end of the year. It blamed the delay on the time-consuming process of obscuring victims’ names and other identifying information. So far, the department has not given any notice when new records will arrive.
That approach angered some accusers and members of Congress who fought to pass the transparency act. Records that were released, including photographs, interview transcripts, call logs, court records and other documents, were either already public or heavily blacked out, and many lacked necessary context.
There were few revelations in the tens of thousands of pages of records that have been released so far. Some of the most eagerly awaited records, such as Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) victim interviews and internal memos shedding light on charging decisions, were not there.