U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the Oval Office of the White House, amid negotiations to end the Russian war in Ukraine, in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 18, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
During a closed-door meeting for a deposition on Tuesday, August 19, members of the House Oversight Committee questioned former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr about government files on billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The committee is chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), a Donald Trump loyalist who argued, during the hearing, that Barr "had never seen anything that would implicate Trump in any of this."
But Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California), a ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, has questions about Trump's relationship with Epstein — nd he is speaking out.
In a statement posted on X by House Oversight Democrats, Garcia argued, "Releasing the Epstein files in batches just continues this White House cover-up. The American people will not accept anything short of the full, unredacted Epstein files….. And, to be clear, yesterday, during his deposition with the Committee, Attorney General Barr could not clear President Trump of wrongdoing. Chairman Comer should release the entire unedited transcript of his interview to the public."
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The New Republic's Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, in an article published on August 20, reports, "The Trump Administration has been in a tailspin over the case files since the beginning of July, when the Justice Department directly contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Jeffrey Epstein's 'client list,' eliciting surprise and upset from the deepest pockets of the MAGA leader's base. Since then, new reporting has pointed to several new ties between the pedophilic financier and the man sitting in the Oval Office, revealing that the pair had a remarkably close relationship."
Houghtaling points out that "some of those details include a salacious letter Trump penned to Epstein for the sex trafficker's 50th birthday."
Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for defamation for their reporting on that letter. But according to MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, the Journal's article was very carefully worded and reads like it was meticulously reviewed by the Journal's legal department before it was published.
Houghtaling notes, "The Wall Street Journal reported, in July, that the Justice Department had notified Trump months earlier that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files. But rather than release the Epstein files and provide the transparency so demanded by his supporters, Trump decided to go in a different direction, attempting to distract from the base-shattering scandal while seeking a new 'list' from Epstein’s incarcerated longtime associate and girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell."
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During an August 19 interview, Garcia told MeidasTouch, "What I would say is that in no way (did) Bill Barr's testimony — change the direction of this case. In no way did Bill Barr say anything that was groundbreaking in a way to halt our desire and need for justice for these victims and our certainty that Donald Trump and his name and other folks that may have been involved in different ways with Epstein are not in these files. We know that they are."
Garcia added, "So, Bill Barr's testimony was an act of Republicans trying to control a narrative."
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Read The New Republic's full article at this link.