To: Interested Parties
Date: November 18, 2025
Re: Debunking Speaker Johnson’s Misleading Claims About Epstein Files Transparency
Today, the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) (H.R. 4405) passed the House of Representatives with overwhelming bipartisan support on a vote of 427-1. The Senate has also agreed by unanimous consent to pass the legislation as soon as it is received in that chamber.
The message sent by today’s landmark events in Congress is clear: the Department of Justice (DOJ) must come clean about all the Epstein files it is withholding from the American people.
This legislation by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) secured the necessary number of signers on the discharge petition last week, bringing the bill to the House floor. (EFTA as a standalone bill is H.R. 4405; H.Res.581 would provide for inclusion of EFTA in a larger bill, H.R. 185. The Senate must still pass the legislation.) Today’s developments come on the heels of Epstein survivors calling for full release of the files and damning revelations that have trickled out from other sources, further underscoring the need and urgency for the administration to release its own Epstein records.
Meanwhile, Speaker Johnson is continuing his campaign to use bad faith, dishonest arguments to help cover up the full extent of Epstein’s web of abuse and pedophilia. Below are rebuttals to Speaker Johnson’s latest claims in his poster and November 18 memo.
Victim Privacy
Despite Speaker Johnson’s misleading claims to the contrary, the Epstein Files Transparency Act would expressly allow the Attorney General to redact victims’ identifying information to protect their personal and medical privacy.
Specifically, the legislation states that the Attorney General may withhold or redact information that “contain personally identifiable information of victims or victims’ personal and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
This language is exactly the same as the exemption for personal privacy in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) statute, which comes with decades of case law. The DOJ even wrote a FOIA manual on this exemption — meaning that the Attorney General and her vast team of government lawyers ought to know how to understand the mechanics of this exemption in both FOIA and in the Epstein Files Transparency Act for balancing all the relevant interests.
Let’s be clear what Speaker Johnson is actually seeking instead: he wants to give the administration even more power to vaguely use privacy as an excuse to hide everything that touches on Epstein’s crimes, even indirectly. No one should take the bait.
“Innocent Persons” or New Victims
Incredibly, Speaker Johnson is going to the mat to shield Epstein’s associates from public embarrassment — including billionaires, powerful politicians, and other members of the wealthy elite — by demanding the government to censor information containing their names in the Epstein files.
However, what matters is what those people did. And what they did brought them into the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein, whose own heinous acts rightfully became the subject of years of major government investigations. If named individuals were among those who did not personally know Epstein or whose interactions with him were minimal, the rest of the released information should reveal this lack of substantive ties. And if the DOJ or FBI determined that some allegation or insinuation against a named individual was “false or not credible,” such a determination would be covered independently by the bill and therefore would be required to be released anyway.
The administration should release it all. The public has a right to know what the government learned about the nature of Epstein’s network. The truth is more important than the hurt feelings of Epstein’s powerful friends and associates, who are now desperately trying to stay in the shadows.
Or as Rep. Massie put it, “This is how @SpeakerJohnson plans to protect perverts who went to the rape island from embarrassment. Do not let the Senate add an amendment to avoid disclosing those rich and powerful men who have evaded justice for so many years. Is Johnson calling all victims ‘non-credible?'”
That is unfortunately the approach taken by Speaker Johnson’s own non-binding resolution on the Epstein files, H. Res. 589, which would limit release of information to what is “credible” and also contains deliberately vague language exempting “demonstrably false or unauthenticated” records from release. Both provisions would be easily exploited by the DOJ to censor or conceal all sorts of Epstein files — that is, virtually any information that conflicts with the government’s preferred narrative — that the American public should be allowed to review for themselves. Ask yourself: do you trust the federal government to decide what information is “false” especially when we have a president who reflexively says any news or information he doesn’t like is “fake”?
Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM)
Speaker Johnson had previously made the false claim that provisions in the Epstein Files Transparency Act to prevent the release of CSAM “cite the wrong provision of the federal code. And so it makes it unworkable.” He now argues that the legislation cites a federal statutory provision that “does not contain any CSAM definition.”
First, regardless of how this legislation is drafted to address CSAM, such materials would necessarily involve the victims’ personal and medical privacy — which is already expressly protected by other provisions of the bill. Furthermore, the Epstein Files Transparency Act correctly identifies the primary, controlling federal statutes governing and prohibiting CSAM, 18 U.S.C. 2256 and 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A: “(B) depicts or contains child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) as defined under 18 U.S.C. 2256 and prohibited under 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A.”
The Epstein Files Transparency Act simply relies on the definition of CSAM in 18 U.S.C. 2256 — the same definitional statute cited in other bills that Speaker Johnson and his House Republican colleagues recently voted for and helped enact into law, including:
Importantly, the Epstein Files Transparency Act would not allow the DOJ to define those terms however it wants to create loopholes for itself. Furthermore, the Epstein Files Transparency Act explicitly exempts any CSAM in the Epstein files from public release by giving the Attorney General clear, unambiguous statutory power to withhold those materials. Even then, the Epstein Files Transparency Act does not need additional statutory authority to block public disclosure of CSAM because the cited statutes already criminalize it.
Contrast the Epstein Files Transparency Act provisions with Speaker Johnson’s own non-binding resolution on the Epstein files, H.Res. 589, which does not even define CSAM in any way. Instead, H.Res. 589 merely refers to “child pornography” and “child sexual abuse or similar materials.” This construction could be exploited by the Department of Justice and FBI to define those terms however they wish and release child sexual abuse materials to the public.
Future Investigations and Grand Jury Materials
The Epstein Files Transparency Act specifically gives the Attorney General discretion to withhold or redact information that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary.” This language thus protects any bona fide criminal prosecutions already well-underway to suss out Epstein’s co-conspirators, while deterring the administration from misusing the exemption to withhold everything.
As for grand jury materials, while it is true that the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure generally provide for confidential grand jury proceedings, the courts can and do sometimes release grand jury records. As the Department of Justice has noted, “there are certain ‘special circumstances’ in which release of grand jury records is appropriate even outside the boundaries of the rule.” As the Congressional Research Service has also advised Congress: “In the balance to be struck in the process of determining whether ‘the need for disclosure is greater than the need for continued secrecy,’ the district court enjoys discretion to judge each case on its own facts.”
Here, the particular facts of the Epstein scandal and now the federal government’s suspicious stonewalling are damning. The Epstein files in the government’s possession that the administration has been fighting so hard to keep secret from the American people may very well contain embarrassing or politically sensitive information — potentially including the government’s handling of the grand jury proceedings. But those legal proceedings and the associated criminal prosecutions ended years ago: Epstein died in 2019, and Maxwell was convicted in 2021. And the risk of embarrassment is no excuse for the government to keep these Epstein files secret.
What former federal prosecutors say, however, is that the grand jury materials are unlikely to contain anything new or interesting:
“People want the entire file from however long. That’s just not what this is.”
“It’s not going to be much because the Southern District of New York’s practice is to put as little information as possible into the grand jury.”
“They basically spoon feed the indictment to the grand jury. That’s what we’re going to see.”
“I just think it’s not going to be that interesting. . . . I don’t think it’s going to be anything new.”
Indeed, President Trump had previously called for the public release of the Epstein federal grand jury materials and the Department of Justice sought the courts to unseal those judicial records. DOJ lawyers even admitted that the grand jury transcripts they are asking the courts to unseal contain testimony from only two witnesses, and that some of the factual accounts have already been publicly disclosed during civil litigation.
For all these reasons, Congress can and should enact Reps. Massie and Khanna’s Epstein Files Transparency Act and affirm that full transparency into the Epstein files in the Department of Justice’s control is in the American public’s best interests.
All this said, we do share concerns that this administration may be now preemptively initiating frivolous criminal investigations and prosecutions against the President’s Democratic political opponents, in part to position itself to improperly invoke this particular exemption in the bill and help cover up the Epstein files. The administration should drop the act and come clean.
“National Security”
During the House vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Speaker Johnson bizarrely made the obviously false claim that this bill would require release of information that could reveal confidential methods and sources. The November 18 memo issued by his office raised two smaller concerns: that 30 days would not be enough to declassify any Epstein records that have been classified and that the bill inappropriately asks the Attorney General to perform the declassification rather than the original classifying authority.
First, the bill contains an exemption that allows the Attorney General to withhold or redact segregable portions of records that “contain information specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order.” Therefore, the bill’s text plainly shows that Speaker Johnson’s claim is false.
Second, while the bill does require the administration to make maximum efforts to declassify any classified Epstein file — a crucial provision given the enormous problem of overclassification in the executive branch — it does not itself directly declassify anything. As for the complaints about the short deadline and declassifying authority, the good news is that the Attorney General has a vast team of lawyers and staffers working for her — many of whom have been battling all year long to keep DOJ’s copies of the Epstein files secret and should be already be thoroughly familiar with what information they have been hiding from the American public.
President Trump himself also could unilaterally direct his administration (DOJ and other agencies) to undertake any declassification efforts right now and coordinate with the Attorney General, without Congress passing any legislation. That in itself exposes the flaws in Speaker Johnson’s own memo, which obviously did not deter him from voting tonight to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act.