EPSTEIN FILES BOMB GOES OFF! Melber on new docs, pics, REDACTIONS, Dems’ PLAN TO SUE & Bondi’s shame

Speaker 1 0:00
The Trump DOJ has begun releasing some Epstein files. We have the letter from the Deputy Attorney General. We have the several types of files which I’m going to talk to you about. And we have the problem that, as many people were skeptically expecting, some of these pages are completely redacted, likely in violation of the law that President Trump signed after he lost his long clash to try to keep Epstein secrecy. I’m Ari Melber, a journalist, lawyer, anchored ms, now do a big special breakdown right now, given this breaking news, we are just hours into it. This is my YouTube, and you can always subscribe for these type of breakdowns. But let’s get right to what the Deputy Attorney General is saying. Pam Bondi said a lot of things about this, and we know she lied. We know that she claimed she had a client list, then she claims she didn’t. Two opposites can’t be true, and she has now been pulled to the background, and the Deputy Attorney General, Blanche Donald Trump’s former defense attorney, has stepped up. And so what he says in this letter, I will tell you about it so you don’t have to read it all, line for line. And it’s really not worth reading the whole thing for an informational perspective. But what he says is, we are trying to comply, but we’re not going to give you all the documents. He says that the department has withheld and redacted, quote, a limited amount of information that’s debatable otherwise covered by and he refers to privileges. There are some legal privileges in the law. That means in the new transparency law, as well as in precedent. Although it looks like the DOJ goes beyond that. He talks about what’s in here. And this is important, because there is new stuff in here. Whenever you deal with these kind of legal stories in the news, sometimes there’s a quick narrative or headline, and I get why, when you look at some of what they’ve done here, but there is new material. He also describes the process, and this matters if they get taken to court, whether they’re being truthful what they’re doing. But he says that over 200 DOJ attorneys have been working on this. That is a huge number, a lot of resources. Reminds you just how big a priority and vulnerability this may be for Trump’s DOJ. The most important part of this letter in my review is page five, where you actually get details on what is new material. And this is important because the victims have spoken out about this. We’ve seen some politicians fight for transparency, and we’ve seen several administrations in both parties generally be secretive and not provide the information. So they say that this production includes portions, maybe not all, of the investigative files for Epstein’s criminal case in 2018 the one where he never went to trial because he died under suspicious circumstances in prison for the 2006 case. That was the Florida sort of sweetheart deal he got for another related 2009 case, and the death investigation and the Grand Jury materials. And so this matters because the law that was forced to be passed after all of this pressure we all lived through it is now getting, according to DOJ, some of those materials out. And so there’s going to be a process, and it’s going to take days, if not weeks, to comb through this material, to see what’s new, where they’re telling the truth, to see what they’ve held back, and possibly for them to end up in court. I can also report that a member of the Oversight Committee for the Democrats told me Friday night they will be suing that they already can see this is not full compliance. Indeed. Blanche, in addition to this letter, went on Fox News and admitted they’re not providing at all as for what the categories are, I’m going to show you first what we’re getting and then what’s already old or not really getting. They provide basically four categories under this new Epstein library that’s on the DOJ website. I was looking through that. I’m going to just give you the straight evidence and facts here. One are court records. They describe that as having pre existing redactions, which makes sense. Let’s say that I mentioned those old cases. They’re putting up the files, some of that are from those old cases where a minor or victim’s name has already been redacted. Fine. But most of those court records, with some exceptions, have already gone through the system. They’re not brand new. Then category two is the most important. They call that DOJ disclosures. That’s things that the DOJ has from this Trump administration or before that may be new, not released. Then they have a Freedom of Information Act Section. That’s pretty much stuff that under federal law you’ve already gotten out. People can sue journalists and other entities do that. It’s not usually where the big, important secret material is. And then finally, they have stuff they already gave to Congress. Who cares? That’s not new. Then you have basically what I mentioned. This is just one example. We were showing about 100 page document from one of these troves, and every single page this is not a magic

Speaker 1 4:38
trick, is fully redacted. It’s very unlikely that that is a legitimate redaction. It’s possible, because you can’t say for sure without knowing what’s underneath it, but there are only certain things that Congress under this law said they can redact for like I mentioned, victims’ names, investigative material, classified material, but an entire document about a dead sex. Sex trafficker wouldn’t normally still be classified, and so it’s hard to see why those kind of redactions are valid. And that brings me to what else I’m going to talk about in this report, which is what comes next in this fight. I also want to mention that what they’re doing now on this deadline in the Trump administration is a classic sort of legal strategy of delay, redact, redirect and defy. Now they’re not just completely defying. You could say, if this were some top secret CIA thing, hey, we’re not going to tell you anything. We’re not replying at all. That would be tough for them for a lot of reasons, including the fact that President Trump signed this bill after he fought it. But they’re not doing that. They’re redirecting by, excuse me, providing some material, like pictures of Bill Clinton and others that they may have their own reasons for, but it is new material, and that’s part of the request, but they hope that it may redound to their benefit or against their opponents, perceived or otherwise, rather than providing all the material they are delaying by Blanche, the deputy I mentioned going on Fox News and elsewhere, and sort of saying, Hey, we’re not going to comply by the deadline, even though the President signed it, even though it’s law, even though he admits they’ve had 200 attorneys working on it in plenty of time. So that’s a type of delay. But he’s not saying, mind you, we’ll never give you all of it. He’s sort of trying to move the goal post, lot of lawyers do this. And by the way, if a court thinks that you’ve tried hard and you just need a little bit of extra time, they’ll usually allow that. They don’t necessarily automatically consider that the biggest violation. That’s also why so many lawyers, and this is true in private practice and government abuse, that lawyers have a reputation for delays, for what in court they call dilatory tactics for doing that as a way to slowly grind people down and hope they move on, or hope the case goes away, et cetera. So that’s the delay. The defiance part comes in the fact that there were very strict rules on how to release this information, precisely because of the secrecy in the past, precisely because there is a real skepticism, and so normally, Grand Jury materials and other materials are kept secret forever, even after a case ends here, Congress did something unusual and said, This is so important, we’re going to change that precedent. And now three judges have ruled that the grand jury materials must come out. They’ve also ruled that other information must come out to the public and be easy to access and searchable. So this isn’t just like, oh, you can throw this in some room or on some hard to read website and leave it. Congress already mandated that, and this is federal law. If there’s any agency that’s supposed to follow and enforce the law, it’s the DOJ. And if you want to think about this in normal terms, if you have a dispute with the government about your IRS bill or some other legal matter. It’s not good enough for you to just say, hey, I’ll get back to you later. Here’s part of what I owe you. Here’s part of what you required. Indeed, people get a lot of trouble for that. And so it goes back to the sort of the elitism and the double standards that are in this case that with all this time in a federal law that this president signed, the DOJ then says, We’ll give you some now and some later. But I think that’s how they’re trying to play this out, to maybe eventually defend in court and say, Hey, we’re not defying, we’re trying. We need more time. The other point here that I want to mention is pressure works. There has been an extraordinary amount of pressure on this administration, on a bipartisan basis, to reveal these materials, and there could be different reasons for that, political reasons, transparency reasons, actually standing up for justice and the survivors. One thing I can tell you, from covering law and politics is you often see the greatest pressure when things overlap and intercede. It’s not just, oh, only a sunlight effort by good government people, or only this type of effort. It actually has all kind of congealed and against the Trump administration secrecy. And so the pressure has worked. If you were watching this story and people say, Oh, it’s all going to be redacted or nothing new is going to be learned, we’ve already now broken through that there is new material people are combing through it. We have a whole standards process in the news where we’re going through each and every number. These are, if you’re interested, what’s called Bates numbers in a document production where each and every piece of evidence has its own traceable file, and you can see that number and then what kind of file it is, and reputable news organizations and journalists go through, and we try to make sense of that first, before putting it out to the world, or putting it out in a way that might be misleading, or even though the government’s supposed to do its reactions in a way that could endanger people. So every single file is being reviewed that way, and some of them are new. And so the pressure has worked to yield that. Then you go to the next step, which is, okay, did it all work on day one, this deadline, and is all of the problem fixed? And it seems the answer is clearly no. As I mentioned, we have members of Congress telling us they’re going to sue. We have other outside experts and independent people looking at this, seeing that it’s insufficient, and that’s what I’ll close with. My review of these of these materials is, although we’re still making sense of it, over time, they basically set up at the Trump DOJ a bunch of. Different doors that you open on this site. It’s not fully searchable, which was required. So it’s more like they’ve given out a janky, difficult to use a homework assignment to the country when, as I was mentioning, the Congress specifically said, No, this should be easy and searchable, precisely to deal with the skepticism and cynicism that the government has has really sowed by being this way, and so we checked, and as of late afternoon, Friday, under the deadline, you could search terms that should be in there, like Maxwell, and they would not yield most of the results that they should. So either the thing is broken or it’s deliberately been made to be difficult, and that violates the law. And like many other debates nowadays, there’s going to be a question over whether the law matters, and who’s going to make them enforce it, and who’s going to get in trouble over this. So you know the next steps are, if Congress sues and these judges that have ruled the grand jury material must be released, and the various ways that you could enforce that. And this isn’t the first time there’s been secrecy in the government. There are examples where court pressure on these individuals, on lawyers who don’t want to be disbarred, on people who are the document custodians. The pressure works, and they turn it over. And there’s been other times where there’s been more secrecy. I think. A final note on the Trump administration’s problems. Their number two at the FBI is leaving this week, I’ve had experts and analysts say that doesn’t look like a coincidence. It looks like related to the Epstein failure, the number one is the FBI. Patel has several problems and scandals, including this one. Pam Bondi, who’s supposed to be in charge of DOJ, didn’t hear from her on Friday for the deadline. Susie Wiles, the Chief of Staff for Trump, kind of threw Bondi under the bus for her past misstatement, as I mentioned, some of them clearly lies about the Epstein case, and now her deputy is sort of leading this. And so next steps are, they could end up in court around the grand jury material, where there’s three active rulings requiring it all be released. We’re going to comb through and see whether it was and whether this type of response, where there are new documents, but they’re also at DOJ admitting that they haven’t fully complied, whether that leads to court orders to comply faster fully. And if you say, Well, how do you enforce that? There’s many measures. There’s contempt. People can lose their law licenses, people can be disciplined, people can be held in prison, jail for contempt of court, if it gets to that point. And then you have the inner branch play, which is Congress. One member of Congress said, If there’s complete defiance, they’ll look at impeachment of President Trump. So this is a story that, on the one hand, still has a long ways to go when it comes to getting full compliance. That could be bad news for Trump if they drag this story out for months more nothing that his detractors would rather talk about more, perhaps, than this story. But there’s also the pressure working if you would have told anyone at the beginning of the year that Trump was going to lose the vote on this, on this big issue, and not have a single Republican senator with him, and that then they were going to force out a bunch of new documents that alone would have seemed like a huge reversal of how things were going. So again, call as we see it, going through the dock. Some of it might be dry and boring, but we are going to continue to comb through. I’ll probably do more updates here on this YouTube channel. You can subscribe if you find this useful, on these different categories, on what we’re getting and how the Trump administration responds if they’re taken to court to complete a process that they long claimed they would support, but now they’ve been hiding, especially if they think anything cuts against Donald Trump.