Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was defiant in the face of potential legal consequences over not fully releasing the Justice Department’s files related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
In an interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker, he was asked about comments from members of Congress exploring possible impeachment or contempt charges and whether he takes the threats seriously.
“Not even a little bit. Bring it on,” Blanche replied. “We are doing everything we’re supposed to be doing to comply with this statute.”
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the Trump administration to release all the Epstein files by Friday with some exceptions to protect victims’ information.
But the documents that have come out only represent a small fraction of the total, and many of them are heavily redacted.
That caused Rep. Ro Khanna, one of the leaders behind the overwhelmingly bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, to warn that the Justice Department wasn’t complying with the law.
Rep. Thomas Massie, who also led the push to release the Epstein files, said in a social media post that a future DOJ could convict Attorney General Pam Bondi and others, adding: “THEY ARE FLAUNTING LAW.”
On Friday, Khanna said he and Massie have already started working on drafting articles of impeachment and inherent contempt against Bondi, though they haven’t decided yet whether to move forward.
“Impeachment is a political decision, and is there the support in the House of Representatives? I mean, Massie and I aren’t going to just do something for the show of it,” Khanna told CNN.
On Sunday, Blanche said that members of Congress criticizing the DOJ’s efforts “have no idea what they’re talking about,” explaining that there are about a million pages of documents, and “virtually all of them contain victim information” that must be protected.
He also argued that releasing the Epstein files on a rolling basis over a matter of weeks instead of all at once on the Friday deadline was still in compliance with the law Congress passed.
“There is well settled law, as they should know, that in a case like this where we’re required to produce within a certain amount of time, but also comply with other laws like redacting information, that very much trumps … some deadline in the statute,” Blanche said.
