Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell has revealed that more than two dozen men received cushy plea deals with the government.
In a habeas petition filed Tuesday aimed at preemptively ending her prison sentence, Maxwell alleged that 29 friends of the notorious sex trafficker had been “protected” by the Justice Department by way of “secret settlements.”
Those settlements went to “25 men” and four potential “co-conspirators,” reported The Daily Beast. The petition has prompted questions regarding the identities of the cloaked individuals—and why the DOJ would offer them protection.
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 19 to force the executive branch to release the files in their entirety. The bill stipulated that the Justice Department had 30 days to comply, but that deadline has since disappeared in the rearview. It is now late January, and less than one percent of the files has been made publicly available.
In a Tuesday court filing, the DOJ offered vague placations that it expects to process the trove, which includes two million documents, “in the near term.” Officials did not provide a specific date for the full release, as required by law.
Employees at the Justice Department are reportedly manually reviewing the pages to find and redact the names of victims and, presumably, censor mentions of protected individuals.
So far, the DOJ has released roughly 12,285 documents related to the Epstein files, totalling 125,575 pages.
Earlier this month, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie called for a special master or independent counsel to hold the DOJ to a timeline as it drags its feet on the cache.
Hellbound and Down 