House Oversight Says DOJ Skipped Interviews With Key Epstein Witnesses

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report Tuesday detailing how the Department of Justice mishandled investigations into sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, failing to interview witnesses.“The crimes committed by Epstein after 2005 could have been prevented and justice served had it not been for the repeated failures of law enforcement and federal prosecutors,” the 136-page report states. The report detailed how the DOJ failed to interview key witnesses while investigating Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse, pointing out that “Too many survivors and other witnesses informed this Committee that they were never approached or properly questioned by federal authorities.” The report called on the DOJ to reinterview witnesses, especially Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff, who survivors say lied to Congress about her role in Epstein’s abuse. The committee pointed out other failures as well, including how the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida entered into a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein in 2007 that allowed him to serve a lesser sentence. Notably, the report also criticizes Trump’s DOJ for failures after the Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed in 2025, saying that the department “failed to adequately communicate about document releases and failed to sufficiently protect survivors. Deficient redactions exposed survivors’ sensitive personal information.” The report still took aim at Democrats, claiming that they put politics first by “trying to implicate President Trump and insinuate that he was involved in the crimes of Epstein and Maxwell,” calling their efforts an “unfounded witch hunt … without regard for the interests of survivors, even though the facts gathered during this investigation do not suggest President Trump is implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes.”While this report is a step forward, the fact that it’s coming out after last week’s midterms, where Republicans lost in a landslide, shows that House Republicans are scrambling to save face. Republicans on the committee are using the report to make partisan attacks against Democrats and absolve President Trump, even though Democrats on the committee released their own report before the election that included a new rape allegation against the president. That woman, Beatrice Keul, is nowhere in Republicans’ report and wasn’t called before the committee.Democrats’ report on the Epstein files:Representative Haley Stevens apparently can’t face her caucus anymore.The Michigan Democrat was caught hiding in the Republican cloakroom during Congress’s first day back in session, seemingly unable to confront her liberal colleagues after her recent public meltdown, The Washington Sun reported Monday night.Stevens imploded her reputation and doomed her political prospects just days before the election, when she demanded that Dr. Abdul El-Sayed—the man who bested her in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary—condemn an ad aired by one of his allies, and further apologize for his prior criticism of Israel.Representative Debbie Dingell then waded into the mix, disinviting Stevens from a church event with El-Sayed and Representative James E. Clyburn, one of Stevens’s lower chamber mentors.That’s when Stevens went berserk. Rather than attempt to make peace or let bygones be bygones, she did a complete 180 and endorsed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, aligning herself with the MAGA nominee in an apparent effort to undermine El-Sayed’s odds. Notably, she did so without telling anyone, as her staff were reportedly at the El-Sayed event waiting for her arrival.But her public tantrum did little to turn Michigan voters away from El-Sayed’s campaign, and by the middle of Election Night, it was clear that he had won the state’s Senate seat.Stevens, meanwhile, now has to face the consequences of her actions. More than half of Stevens’s staff have already resigned, while Democratic leaders have condemned her duplicity. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a “despicable betrayal,” while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries slammed it as a “terrible decision” that could result in Stevens’s expulsion from the Democratic House caucus.But not every Democrat is in agreement that Stevens’s time in the Democratic Party is over.“We have three more weeks or two more weeks of being in Congress, so I don’t think we should start making judgments about anybody in the caucus at this point,” said outgoing California Representative Nancy Pelosi. “I was disappointed, I conveyed that to her. I want to be helpful to her in terms of how she deals with this, but I’m not supporting kicking her out.”Yet despite her sudden affinity for the opposing party, Stevens is still keen to cling to her political identity.“I am a Democrat who has voted with my caucus 96 percent of the time this term and I don’t expect that to change,” Stevens told the Detroit Free Press Tuesday. (Well, it will change in that after January 2, 2027, she won’t have a vote with the caucus anymore.)Attorney General Todd Blanche doubled down on Tuesday on his threat to go after Democrats in Congress. Speaking on Fox & Friends, Blanche claimed his role in government was “to defend the administration.” From what, exactly? The supposedly “vile rhetoric” of incoming Democratic lawmakers arriving on Capitol Hill. “You can disagree with this administration, you can want to legislate your way with new policies, but you cannot threaten, and that’s what we’re seeing, and that’s what we’re very concerned about at the Department of Justice,” he said. “We cannot let the rhetoric turn from just honest debate to actual criminal conduct,” he added. The attorney general didn’t deign to provide a single example of a criminal act by the Democratic Party. The so-called threats he was referring to, the rest of us simply know as oversight—something which was rendered impossible by the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Now Democrats have warned the Trump administration to “lawyer up,” and clearly, its lawyer has responded by threatening free speech. What a show of confidence.The attorney general’s role has historically been to represent the United States and provide legal advice to the president and his Cabinet officials. The Justice Department is meant to be an independent organization, free from presidential interference. Clearly, Blanche has stretched the role of U.S. attorney general to be weaponized against the president’s perceived political enemies.During yet another public meltdown on CNN on Sunday, Blanche admitted that he’d target Democrats at Trump’s behest and openly accused Democrats of threatening “anybody that’s conservative and anybody that happens to be a Republican.” Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes edited its latest interview with Donald Trump to make the octogenarian’s responses appear much more sane than they actually were.During one exchange between Trump and host Ross Douthat on the topic of Ukraine, the staff at 60 Minutes decided to trim several sections of Trump’s response that included false claims or total fabrications.“There’s still a war going on. What’s the biggest obstacle to peace?” asked Douthat.“It was the hatred between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskiy and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Trump said in the version of the program that aired Sunday.But much more was left on the cutting room floor, according to an unedited version published Decoding Fox News founder Juliet Jeske. “I believe that we’re very close to making a deal,” Trump said. “And I think it—two things, if I were president, because as you know, well you’re not going to admit it, it was rigged. That’s why I did it a third time. If I was president that war would have never started.”During another portion of the interview, 60 Minutes cut Trump’s answer when he attempted to puff himself up as tough on Russia and soft on Ukraine: “Look what I did to them as an example. I gave them the anti-tank busters, right?”“I’ve given them, in fact there’s an old statement, that [Barack] Obama gave them sheets, and I gave them anti-tank busters, okay? That’s what I gave them,” Trump said.“But now it’s Europe supplying weapons, not us?” asked Douthat.“No, it’s us. We’re supplying the weapons, Europe is paying for them,” Trump answered. “Here’s the difference: [Joe] Biden gave them $350 billion worth of cash and weapons. I gave them nothing.”It’s not unusual for news programs to edit interviews before they go live on air. But there is a deep irony that Trump seems perfectly content to have his answers edited for time and clarity, little more than two years after he went on a rampage against CBS News for doing the same to Kamala Harris while she was on the 2024 campaign trail.At the time, Trump insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump sued the network for $10 billion after the interview, claiming that the different clips were tantamount to “election interference” and merited CBS losing its broadcast license. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, settled the lawsuit for $16 million the following year.But Trump’s campaign against 60 Minutes initiated its reputational descent. In the months that followed the settlement, Paramount Global merged with Skydance, allowing CBS News to be taken over by David Ellison, the son of Trump’s good friend Larry Ellison.The younger Ellison thereafter appointed Free Press founder Weiss to run the CBS newsroom, despite the fact that she had zero qualifications to do so. Weiss has since dismantled large portions of CBS, including 60 Minutes, forcing out dozens of highly esteemed anchors, correspondents, and producers in the process, and replacing them with the likes of Douthat, a former conservative columnist for The New York Times.Weiss’s indisputably negative impact on CBS News was made apparent last week during election night, when the network’s ratings finished dead last among all major broadcasters and cable networks, according to Nielsen data obtained by media reporter Brain Stelter.Read more about the interview:Did Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth think it was too woke to keep track of $1.3 billion worth of fighter jet parts?A report published on Monday by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that the Defense Department has not kept adequate records of parts for the F-35 Lightning II, which are worth an estimated $31 billion in total.As of March, 17,000 parts that were in maintenance or repair were missing from the F-35 Joint Program Office’s enterprise logistics management system. The total value of the parts was estimated to be $1.3 billion, but officials stated that the value could be as high as $2.5 billion when accounting for other burden costs.The GAO also uncovered evidence that suggested serious data quality issues. Only 29 percent of the records in a December 2025 contract data requirements list contained serial numbers, and six percent of records showed an acquisition cost of $0.01 or less.This report comes as the House of Representatives is poised to vote on a procedural motion on Hegseth’s impeachment on Tuesday evening. Outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massie’s 34-page impeachment resolution accuses Hegseth of committing a slew of impeachable offenses such as illegally waging war against Iran, suppressing free speech, ignoring laws intended to minimize civilian casualties, and overseeing extrajudicial killings and the kidnapping of a foreign leader. Hegseth claimed on Tuesday that not only were his contested actions lawful, but they also resulted in military victories.