Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking ‘client list' does not exist, Justice Department says
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The acknowledgement that the well-connected Epstein did not have a list of clients to whom underage girls were trafficked represents a public walk-back of a theory that the Trump administration had helped promote, with Bondi suggesting in a Fox News interview earlier this year that such a document was 'sitting on my desk' in preparation for release.
Even as it released video from inside a New York prison meant to definitively prove that Epstein committed suicide, the department also said in a memo that it was refusing to release other evidence investigators had collected.
Bondi for weeks had suggested that more material was going to be revealed – 'It's a new administration and everything is going to come out to the public', she said at one point – after a first document dump she had hyped angered US President
Donald Trump's base by failing to deliver revelations.
That episode, in which conservative internet personalities were invited to the White House in February and provided with binders marked 'The Epstein Files: Phase 1' and 'Declassified' that contained documents that had largely already been in the public domain, has spurred far-right influencers to lambast and deride Bondi.
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After the first release fell flat, Bondi said officials were poring over a 'truckload' of previously withheld evidence she said had been handed over by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In a March television interview, she claimed the Biden administration 'sat on these documents, no one did anything with them', adding: 'Sadly these people don't believe in transparency, but I think more unfortunately, I think a lot of them don't believe in honesty.'
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