By ERIC TUCKER, Related Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump leapt to the protection of Lawyer Normal Pam Bondi on Tuesday within the face of mounting criticism from far-right influencers and conservative web personalities over the Justice Division’s abrupt refusal to launch extra paperwork from the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking investigation.
When a reporter tried to ask Bondi about Epstein at a White Home Cupboard assembly, Trump headed off the questions and scolded the journalist: “Are you continue to speaking about Jeffrey Epstein? This man’s been talked about for years.”
“At a time like this,” he added, “the place we’re having among the best success and likewise tragedy with what occurred in Texas, it simply looks like a desecration.”
The feedback appeared to sign continued job safety for Bondi and amounted to a placing rebuke of members of Trump’s base who’ve known as for her resignation and mocked her for what they imagine to be her failed dedication to launch incriminating information from the Epstein investigation. A supposed Epstein “consumer listing” that Bondi as soon as intimated was sitting on her desk for assessment doesn’t exist, the Justice Division acknowledged in a two-page memo Monday that additional riled conservative critics who’d been hoping for proof of a authorities cover-up.
The strain is on Bondi
Bondi has confronted strain after a primary doc dump she hyped didn’t ship revelations. Far-right influencers have been invited to the White Home in February and supplied with binders marked “The Epstein Information: Part 1” and “Declassified” that contained paperwork that had largely already been within the public area.
After the primary launch fell flat, Bondi stated officers have been poring over a “truckload” of beforehand withheld proof she stated had been handed over by the FBI and raised expectations of forthcoming releases.
However after a months-long assessment of proof within the authorities’s possession, the Justice Division stated in Monday’s memo that no “additional disclosure can be applicable or warranted.” The division famous that a lot of the fabric was positioned beneath seal by a courtroom to guard victims and “solely a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”
The one proof disclosed as a part of the memo was a video meant to definitively show that the rich financier had taken his personal life in jail in 2019, however even that disclosure did little to quiet conspiracy theorists who imagine he was killed.
It’s not a contented improvement for on-line detectives
The division’s consumer listing revelation was particularly dismaying for conservative influencers and on-line sleuths on condition that Bondi in a Fox Information interview in February had intimated that such a doc was “sitting on my desk” for assessment. Bondi insisted Tuesday that she had been referring to the Epstein case file as being on her desk, versus a particular consumer listing.
“That’s what I meant by that,” she stated.
She additionally defended her earlier public statements suggesting that the FBI was reviewing “tens of hundreds” of movies of Epstein with “youngsters or baby porn.” The Related Press printed a narrative final week concerning the unanswered questions surrounding these movies and the Justice Division’s refusal to supply readability.
The memo Monday didn’t counsel that the movies within the authorities’s possession depicted Epstein with youngsters, as a substitute referring to photographs of Epstein in addition to greater than 10,000 “downloaded movies and pictures of unlawful baby intercourse abuse materials and different pornography.”
“They turned out to be baby porn downloaded by that disgusting Jeffrey Epstein,” she stated.
However she didn’t clarify why the division couldn’t launch different information from the “truckload” of proof she stated was delivered to the company months in the past.
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