Congress
Mike Johnson chides DOJ for tracking lawmakers’ perusal of unredacted Epstein files
Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday he disapproves of the Justice Department surveilling lawmakers who come to agency headquarters to review the unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for anybody to be tracking that,” Johnson told reporters. “So I will echo that to anybody involved with DOJ, and I’m sure it was an oversight. That’s my guess.”
This week, members of Congress have been invited to a DOJ office building to read materials related to the federal case against Epstein that have not been scrubbed for public consumption.
“Members should obviously have the right to peruse those at their own speed and with their own discretion,” Johnson said.
But revelations came to light Wednesday, when Attorney General Pam Bondi was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, that the department might be keeping tabs on which documents lawmakers are viewing on official computers. During Bondi’s appearance on Capitol Hill, a photo was taken of her research binder that revealed a print-out page of the “Search History” for Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
“It is an outrage that DOJ is tracking Members’ investigative steps undertaken to ensure that DOJ is complying with the Epstein File Transparency Act and using this information for the Attorney General’s embarrassing polemical purposes,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, in a statement.
Jayapal said in an interview with NPR that she had also raised her concerns with Johnson.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, at his weekly news conference Thursday, said he would follow up to ensure Johnson is pressing the matter with the DOJ directly and “make clear to him that his job is to defend this institution.”
Jeffries continued, “it does violate the principles of separate and co-equal branches of government. And of course, my Republican colleagues should be denouncing it, but they will not, because they simply are reckless rubber stamps for Donald Trump’s extreme behavior.”
Asked whether Democrats would seek reprisal for the DOJ tracking, Jeffries said “accountability can either happen right now” or “in the aftermath of the November midterm elections,” when the New Yorker is bullish that his party will retake control of the House.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment about the motivation behind monitoring lawmakers’ searches or plans to stop the practice.
A coalition of children’s safety advocates is urging House leaders to reject a bipartisan compromise on online safety, arguing it weakens protections for minors and lets tech companies avoid accountability.
In a letter first shared with Blue Light News, the groups urged Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) and ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) to oppose the bipartisan package — known as the KIDS Act — ahead of a potential House vote as soon as next week.
Led by Design It For Us, ParentsTogether, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and the Young People’s Alliance and signed by 90 other organizations, the coalition said the deal struck by Energy and Commerce lawmakers fails to address its chief concern: the omission of a “duty of care” provision that would require tech companies to mitigate harms they know their products cause to young users.
“The Committee rejected our concerns and opted to negotiate a version that let Big Tech off the hook and rush this legislation to the House floor,” they wrote.
The warning comes after the groups previously raised similar concerns when the committee approved a version of the KIDS Act along party lines in March.
The Senate’s version of the Kids Online Safety Act — an expected component of Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s ongoing negotiations over online safety regulations — includes the “duty of care” language. Some House members have raised concerns that it could incentivize social media platforms to overzealously censor content to avoid litigation.
“It pains us that, given how hard we have fought for a strong federal solution to online child protection and for a strong bill to move to the House floor, the KIDS Act is the bill the House is championing,” they wrote, urging lawmakers to oppose the bill.
Parents RISE, a coalition of parents who have experienced child loss or mental health difficulties due to tech platforms, sent a second letter to the same parties laying out similar qualms. “We did not create Social Media Victims Remembrance Day so that our children’s names could be used as cover for a bill that protects the very companies that harmed them,” they wrote.
Tech industry group NetChoice has come out against the KIDS Act over censorship concerns.
Spokespeople for Johnson, Jeffries, Guthrie and Pallone did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Leon Black told the House Oversight Committee on Friday that he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes during the years he paid the convicted sex offender tens of millions of dollars, according to a copy of the billionaire investor’s prepared remarks.
“I don’t understand why people — including members of this committee — would accept baseless speculation about me without regard to the facts and spin such ugly and vicious narratives that are demonstrably false,” Black said in his opening statement, obtained by Blue Light News.
Lawmakers, however, filed into Black’s scheduled transcribed interview Friday morning already suspicious of their witness. House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters he believed Black’s testimony had “the potential to be the most groundbreaking” of anything the panel has heard so far in its long-running Epstein investigation.
Comer also said the committee had reason to believe that Black had signed nondisclosure agreements with some of Epstein’s victims.
Black, a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, did acknowledge in his prepared remarks that he was aware of Epstein’s 2008 sex crime conviction at the time of their association but that “Epstein told me that it was an isolated incident resulting from a fake ID.”
“Five years after his conviction, I gave Epstein a second chance, as did many others,” he continued. “I wish I had not.”
Black also told lawmakers that he knew Epstein for 18 years before he began paying him in 2013 for tax and estate planning. At that time, Black said, he saw Epstein surrounded by some of the world’s most powerful people — among them former President Bill Clinton, tech mogul and philanthropist Bill Gates and then-White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler.
And he appeared to suggest that he saw Epstein as legitimate, in part, because of those who chose to associate with him: “Epstein appeared to me and to many others to have redeemed himself: [H]e served on several prestigious boards, hobnobbed with leading people in academia, the arts, business executives, and numerous world leaders.”
Clinton and Gates have already spoken with Oversight investors about their ties to Epstein; Ruemmler has agreed to sit for an interview with the panel in July.
Black said he ultimately fired Epstein in 2018 “after growing tired of his relentless pursuit of more and more money from me for professional services, his mistruths and misrepresentations … and his failure to repay most of a $30 million demand loan that I had made to him.”
He also acknowledged the allegations of sexual misconduct that have been levied against him in litigation, which he called “demonstrably baseless” and “entirely fabricated.”
In one recent case, the judge found that the law firm that had been representing Black’s accusers and the plaintiff in the case were “engaged in serious, sanctionable misconduct in this case.” However, the lawsuit — brought by a woman who claimed to have been raped by Black when she was 16 — was allowed to proceed.
“There are numerous allegations of real abuse by women — by survivors — against Mr. Black,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, told reporters Friday morning.
President Donald Trump handed Speaker Mike Johnson a lifeline Thursday to get Republicans’ agenda back on track next week.
But hard-liners’ festering discontent over Trump’s stalled election bill could jam the chamber again.
For now, members plan to return Monday and press forward on a long list of major legislation before Independence Day recess, including fiscal 2027 funding bills, the annual defense policy bill, a kids online safety bill and negotiations for a third reconciliation measure lawmakers want to stuff with party priorities.
Trump Thursday instructed the band of GOP hard-liners to lift their procedural block of House floor business. Still, some are doubling down in new ways.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who engineered this week’s impasse through a blockade of procedural votes, said if leaders want her support to advance legislation next week, they’ll need to attach the SAVE America Act to the defense policy bill.
Senior House Republicans feel joining the bills would kill the must-pass defense legislation that typically wins bipartisan support. And Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday that attaching the two measures would also sink the defense bill in the Senate.
Meanwhile, another hard-liner, Rep. Chip Roy, responded to Trump’s call to lift the House gridlock with a new list of legislative demands for House leaders.
Johnson, for his part, focused on the positive. He told reporters at the Capitol after meeting Trump that he and the president are “on exactly the same page” about stopping “any blockade in the House.”
He also said Congress would be transmitting the housing affordability bill it cleared this week to the White House, after the president abruptly reversed course Wednesday on a signing ceremony for the bill and demanded Senate passage of the controversial election overhaul first.
What else we’re watching:
— HISPANIC CAUCUS BRACES FOR CHAIR’S SUCCESSOR: Hispanic Caucus members are still reeling from Chair Adriano Espaillat’s electoral defeat this week. But they’re warily preparing to welcome his successor — with some conditions. Darializa Avila Chevalier — a Democratic Socialist who ousted Espaillat in New York’s primary Tuesday, said Thursday in a statement she plans to join the CHC when she gets to Congress, which is all but guaranteed in November.
— COMER TO GRILL EPSTEIN-LINKED INVESTOR: Investor Leon Black will speak to House Oversight Friday for an interview Chair James Comer has called “the big one” in his panel’s investigation of the Jeffrey Epstein case. “It’s going to be hard for him to deny the questions we’re going to ask,” Comer told reporters this week.
Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney, Riley Rogerson and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.
- Online safety coalition urges House to reject KIDS Act compromise
- Leon Black tells House Oversight he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes
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