Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., accused the Trump administration of orchestrating a "cover-up" as the deadline for the release of documents and materials related to the late Jeffrey Epstein arrives.
Schumer on Friday blasted the Department of Justice (DOJ) following Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's admission that the administration would not be releasing all the documents in one, massive tranche.
Congress last month passed a law, later signed by President Donald Trump, that compelled the DOJ to dump all the documents, albeit with certain exceptions, including materials that reveal victims' identities or medical files, child sex abuse materials, information that could jeopardize active investigations, images of graphic death or injury, or classified national security information.
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"This just shows the Department of Justice, Donald Trump, and [Attorney General] Pam Bondi are hellbent on hiding the truth," Schumer said in a statement. "Senate Democrats are working closely with attorneys for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and with outside legal experts to assess what documents are being withheld and what is being covered up by Pam Bondi. We will not stop until the whole truth comes out."
"People want the truth and continue to demand the immediate release of all the Epstein files," he continued. "This is nothing more than a cover-up to protect Donald Trump from his ugly past."
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Earlier in the week, Schumer warned that failure to release the documents on Friday would result in legal and political ramifications for Trump and the DOJ.
His ire came after Blanche, in an interview with Fox News, said that the DOJ would be following through with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents related to Epstein, his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, known associates and entities linked to Epstein and Maxwell, internal DOJ decision-making on the Epstein case, records on destroying or tampering with documents, and all documents on his detention and death.
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But, it wouldn't be every shred of information on the late pedophile.
"Now the most important thing that the attorney general has talked about, that [FBI Director Kash] Patel has talked about, is that we protect victims," Blanche said. "And so what we're doing is we are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story, to the extent it needs to be protected, is completely protected."
"And so I expect that we're going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks," he continued. "So today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more."
