Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: US President Donald Trump on November 19 signed the bill compelling the Justice Department to release all the files related to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The bill, formally titled the Epstein Files Transparency Act, was earlier cleared by the US House of Representatives with a 427-1 vote and the Senate agreed to clear the bill unanimously. “Democrats have used the ‘Epstein’ issue, which affects them far more than the Republican Party, in order to try and distract from our AMAZING Victories,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social.
Now, the Bill requires the Justice Department to release all files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in a federal prison in 2019, within 30 days. As recently as last week, the Trump administration even summoned one Republican proponent of releasing the files, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, to the Situation Room to discuss the matter, although she did not change her mind.
But over the weekend, Trump did a sharp U-turn on the files once it became clear that congressional action was inevitable. It’s long been established that Trump had been friends with Epstein, the disgraced financier who was close to the world’s elite. But the president has consistently said he did not know of Epstein’s crimes and had cut ties with him long ago.
Before Trump returned to the White House for a second term, some of his closest political allies helped fuel conspiracy theories about the government’s handling of the Epstein case, asserting a cover-up of potentially incriminating information in those files.
