On Monday, Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, emerged from a closed-door review of newly unredacted Justice Department documents with a startling claim.
“I typed in Donald Trump’s name,” Raskin told reporters. “It appeared more than a million times. It’s everywhere.”
The documents stem from the federal government’s long-running investigation into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Now, with Trump back in the White House in 2026, Democrats say the rollout of those files feels less like transparency — and more like damage control.
Lawmakers were granted limited access to the unredacted files at a secure Justice Department satellite office in Washington. Four computers. Business hours only. No copies allowed.
Raskin called the setup “absurd.”
“The idea that members of Congress can meaningfully review millions of documents under those conditions is ridiculous,” he said. “This isn’t transparency. It’s theater.”
He went further, accusing the Trump administration of deliberately slow-walking disclosure.
“To me, this whole 9-to-5 viewing window is part of a cover-up,” Raskin said. “If you’re serious about accountability, you release the documents. You don’t ration them.”
The Justice Department has maintained that the remaining unreleased files — estimated by some lawmakers to total at least three million pages — are “largely duplicative.”
Raskin scoffed at that explanation.
“If they’re duplicative, then release them,” he said. “Let the public decide what matters. That’s how democracy works.”
One section of the files appears to challenge a long-standing narrative about Trump’s break with Epstein.
Trump has repeatedly said he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after the financier allegedly tried to recruit young spa employees.
In July 2025, Trump told reporters he personally confronted Epstein.
“I told him, ‘We don’t want you taking our people,’” Trump said at the time. “And he did it again, and I said, ‘Out of here.’”
But Raskin says a redacted 2009 email exchange between Epstein’s lawyers and Trump’s legal team tells a different story.
“Epstein’s lawyers quote Trump as saying Epstein was a guest at Mar-a-Lago and had never been asked to leave,” Raskin claimed. “That portion was redacted. Why?”
He added: “It appears to contradict what the president has been saying publicly.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.
Trump has never been charged in connection with Epstein’s crimes, and no evidence has surfaced tying him to the sex trafficking scheme that led to Epstein’s 2019 federal indictment.
Still, their past social relationship has long drawn scrutiny.
In a 2002 interview, Trump famously described Epstein as a “terrific guy” and noted that he liked “beautiful women … on the younger side.” The comment resurfaced repeatedly during the 2024 campaign and again during Trump’s return to office in 2026.
Photographs from the late 1990s show the two men attending events together in Palm Beach and New York.
The president has since insisted their friendship cooled years before Epstein’s legal troubles became public.
“I wasn’t friendly with him,” Trump has said repeatedly. “I kicked him out. That’s the story.”
For Democrats, the issue isn’t just Trump’s past association with Epstein. It’s what they see as a pattern of selective disclosure under an administration already facing criticism over ethics enforcement and executive power.
“This isn’t about gossip,” one senior Democratic aide told reporters. “It’s about whether the Department of Justice under President Trump is shielding politically damaging information.”
With the 2026 midterms approaching and control of Congress at stake, Democrats are signaling they will push for a full document dump.
“We owe it to the victims,” Raskin said. “And we owe it to the American people.”
The Justice Department has not announced whether additional releases are planned.
But on Capitol Hill, one thing is clear: the Epstein files are no longer just a criminal archive. They are now a political flashpoint in Trump’s second presidency — and Democrats are betting voters want the full story.
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Fortunately, as usual, Trump did nothing wrong…