Despite the White House’s calls to move on, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are curious about what the Justice Department has on Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier who was charged with sexually abusing minors.
Epstein’s death by suicide in 2019 fueled many questions and conspiracies. Was he a spy? Did he know too much about too many important people? And most importantly, was his death a murder?
President Donald Trump played into the speculation and even promised his base the release of the Epstein files while he was campaigning in 2024. But his tune has since changed.
Now, Trump is instructing the MAGA crowd to forget about the case.
But the curiosity about Epstein and the powerful people connected to him may be too high to contain.
On Thursday, Republicans teed up a vote on a non-binding resolution that would call for the release of the information related to the Epstein case.
“I’d love to see whatever there is to see. I think there are good things that would come from more public awareness on the issue. I don’t know exactly how this plays out,” one Senate Republican told Semafor.
Is there a client list?
In a July 2025 memo, the Justice Department and the FBI said they concluded their investigation into Epstein and found no evidence of a "client list.“
From the 1990s until his arrest, Epstein trafficked underage girls and young women, harming more than 1,000, as per the memo.
But their investigation concluded that Epstein died by suicide in his prison cell following his arrest in 2019 over federal sex trafficking charges.
In February, Trump appointed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who, in a Fox News interview, said that Epstein’s client list sat on her desk as the Justice Department continues to review the evidence.
But she faced backlash after she backtracked and said no such list related to the trafficking of minors existed.
“I kept saying, there has to be more. There has to be more,” Bondi said Saturday. “I was assured that’s it.”
She promised to seek out the “thousands of pages of documents” under the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York’s possession.
Trump has defended Bondi and urged his supporters to forget the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax.”
“The fact that the U.S. government, the one that I voted for, refused to take my question seriously and instead said, ‘Case closed, shut up conspiracy theorist,’ was too much for me,” Tucker Carlson said Friday at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
“And I don’t think the rest of us should be satisfied with that.”
What’s already been released about Epstein
Bondi may be under fire, but she declassified what she called the “first phase” of the Epstein files in February.
The materials consisted of flight logs, an evidence list and a redacted list of contacts.
In May, she told reporters she would release more files but the names of the victims would be redacted.
There’s an existing trove of information on Epstein, including the evidence from the Virgin Islands’ investigation and the documents from Virginia Giuffre‘s defamation case against Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty of child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with Epstein.
Giuffre died by suicide at the age of 41 earlier this year. She was a survivor of Epstein’s abuse and was allegedly trafficked to Epstein’s circle of powerful people.
Epstein’s connections with Trump
Trump faces pushback from his MAGA supporters for declining to release the entirety of the files.
“Rather than just admit that, Pam Bondi made a bunch of ludicrous claims on cable news shows that she couldn’t back up, and this current outrage is the result,” Carlson told NBC News.
Trump’s well-documented relationship with Epstein is also under scrutiny. He knew Epstein for decades before he was charged with trafficking of minors.
“I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” the president said in 2019, following Epstein’s arrest.
In a 2002 profile of Epstein, Trump called him a “Terrific guy,” whom he’d known for 15 years.
“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life,’ Trump said at the time.
Did Bill Clinton know Jeffrey Epstein?
The same profile touched on Epstein’s relationship with former President Bill Clinton.
Clinton traveled to Africa on Epstein’s private jet in the early 2000s in association with the Clinton Foundation’s philanthropic efforts.
Clinton was also photographed on the plane in 2002 alongside one of Epstein’s victims.
The former president, in his 2024 memoir, Citizen, said he wished he’d “never met” Epstein, as Fox News reported.
“Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” he wrote.
Who was Epstein
Epstein had an ordinary background. He was the son of immigrants and did not graduate from college. He wound up teaching math at The Dalton School, a prep school in New York, for two years in his early 20s before being dismissed for “poor performance,” according to a New York Times report.
But this job became a stepping stone as he worked for an investment bank before managing money for billionaires like Les Wexner, the co-founder of Bath & Body Works.
By the time he was arrested, Epstein had acquired wealth and his Rolodex was full of influential names.
He owned a Boeing 727 plane, several properties in New York, Florida, Paris and a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.