President Donald Trump said Friday that he supports the Justice Department sending Jeffrey Epstein files to the House Oversight Committee.
“Innocent people shouldn’t be hurt. But I’m in support of keeping it totally open. I couldn’t care less. You got a lot of people that it could be mentioned in those files that don’t deserve to be,” he said. “Because he knew everybody in Palm Beach. I don’t know anything about that.”
The panel is expected to start receiving materials from the Justice Department Friday. The committee had said that it planned to make records public after receiving materials from DOJ, but would review the files first to ensure victims’ identities were redacted.
Trump said he has told Attorney General Pam Bondi to give Congress as much information as possible.
“The whole Epstein thing is a Democrat hoax. So we had the greatest six months, seven months in the history of the presidency, and the Democrats don’t know what to do, so they keep bringing up that stuff,” Trump said.
House Oversight Chair James Comer said Thursday that his panel would “work as quickly as we can” to make records public.
“You know, this is sensitive information. We want to make sure we don’t do anything to harm or jeopardize any victims that were involved in this, but we’re going to be transparent,” Comer told reporters on Capitol Hill.
When pressed by CNN on why the committee would not immediately release the files since DOJ was instructed by the House subpoena to redact victims’ identities and other sensitive information, Comer responded: “I can’t imagine very many scenarios where we would further redact anything.”
“Usually we have concerns over over-redaction. So we’re just going to see what they send us and we’ll go from there,” he said.
Many Republicans have called for more transparency surrounding the case and the release of records related to the matter, and the issue roiled the House before lawmakers departed on the extended August recess. Speaker Mike Johnson took steps to delay until September a vote of the full House to publicly release the DOJ’s Epstein files.
CNN’s Sarah Ferris contributed reporting.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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