Epstein Files Transparency Act
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| Epstein Files Opaqueness Act more like |
The Epstein Files Transparency Act is a law passed by the 119th United States Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on November 19, 2025. It requires the US Attorney General to "make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format" all files (the "Epstein files") pertaining to the prosecution of the deceased child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (if needed, declassifying them to the extent possible) within 30 days of passage, and then to give the Judiciary Committees in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate an unredacted "list of all government officials and politically exposed persons" named in the files.
In September 2025, Representative Thomas Massie, a member of the Republican Party, filed a discharge petition in support of the Bill. On November 12, the discharge petition received the minimum-required 218 signatures needed, from 4 Republican representatives (Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Massie) and 214 Democratic Party representatives, forcing a House vote on the bill. The House of Representatives voted 427–1 to pass the act on November 18, 2025, with Republican representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana casting the lone nay vote. The next day, the Senate passed the bill via unanimous consent, and Trump signed the bill into law. The law gave the Attorney General 30 days to release the documents.
On December 19, the US Department of Justice released the first batch of Epstein files, violating US law in failing to release all the files by that day. This failure received bipartisan criticism. Many documents contained extensive redactions, with hundreds of pages entirely blacked out. Following a delayed and heavily criticised rollout, the Department of Justice released additional files in waves, with a fifth release on January 30, 2026. Following this, the department claimed that it had fulfilled its legal obligations and released all available files, amounting to over 3.5 million pages. This announcement received pushback, with some reports indicating that the full Epstein files consist of over 6 million pages.[1] A sixth release was published on March 5, 2026. Following this, about 50,000 previously removed files were restored, after review from the DOJ and FBI.[2]
The publication of the Epstein files led to the resignations of several prominent public figures and politicians, as well as the arrests of Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. In April 2026, Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, reportedly due to her handling of the Epstein files.[3]
References
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