The bipartisan duo that spearheaded efforts to force the Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files is now asking a federal judge to appoint an official to oversee the process.

This new request from Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) comes as the DOJ is under criticism from members of both parties for not complying with the law Congress passed late last year, which mandated the department to make materials related to the late convicted sex offender public by Dec. 19.

The department, instead, has been rolling out documents in tranches, with redactions Massie, Khanna and others say go beyond what they outlined in their legislation.

“Put simply, the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act,” Massie and Khanna wrote to Judge Paul E. Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York, who is overseeing the case against Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. “Absent an independent process, as outlined above, we do not believe the DOJ will produce the records that are required by the Act and what it has represented to this Court.”

The two lawmakers are asking Engelmayer to appoint a so-called special master, or independent monitor, to preside over the continued release — a court-appointed administrator who would ensure the administration follows the law.

A judge has wide discretion to appoint a special master, and judges sometimes take such a step in cases where there are a large number of documents and questions of privilege. A special master is often a retired federal judge.

The judge who oversaw the case against Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, appointed a special master to review the documents seized from Cohen’s properties to assess which were subject to attorney-client privilege, for example.

It’s not clear if Engelmayer might be inclined to appoint a special master.

Massie and Khanna criticized the limited roll-out of materials and the extensive redactions. They also note their bill required Attorney General Pam Bondi to provide details on redactions, which was not submitted to Congress by the statutory deadline.

“The court can rule fairly quickly,” Massie told reporters Thursday. “Pam Bondi is in communication with this judge about the document production … we are stepping in and offering our opinion on what would be helpful.”

“We believe they’re over-redacting material,” he continued. “And they’re also releasing it in a manner as to just flood the channel with stuff that doesn’t matter while they withhold the things that do matter.”

Massie and Khanna have also threatened to hold Bondi in “inherent contempt” — a long-dormant congressional power — over her department’s handling of the case. Massie said Thursday that their effort to pursue that mechanism was still ongoing, but that he is currently focused on the effort to appoint a special master.

“I think it’s the quickest way to produce, to expedite the document production, because these lawyers at the DOJ understand what judges can do in courtrooms,” he added. “And they are already communicating with that judge, even though they’re not communicating with us.”

The House voted Thursday not to overturn a pair of vetoes President Donald Trump made to legislation on a Colorado water pipeline and a Florida flood control project — despite Congress passing the bills with no objections last month.

The votes represented the first attempted veto overrides of the Republican-controlled House, following what were Trump’s first vetoes of his second term in office. And while Trump has acknowledged that his vetoes were for political reasons, most of the House GOP declined to override him.

The vote to uphold the veto of a water infrastructure project bill in Colorado, which is currently ensnared in the administration’s fight with the state’s Congressional delegation over cuts to a local climate center, got 248 votes, short of the 285 two-thirds majority needed for an override. Just 35 Republicans joined all 213 Democrats in voting for it.

That project sits in the district of Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, who also defied Trump and earned the White House’s ire by supporting a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill compelling the Justice Department’s full release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“I will continue to fight for Western water. This was a commitment made by President Trump in 2020 and I will continue to fulfill that commitment,” Boebert told reporters after the vote Thursday.

The House also voted 236-188 to uphold Trump’s veto of legislation that would support the local Miccosukee Tribe, which has been at odds with the White House over the administration’s plans to build its “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center. The bill was endorsed by Florida’s Republican senators and several GOP members of the Florida delegation in the House.

Twenty-four Republicans and all 212 Democrats voted to overturn the veto, with one Republican, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, voting “present.” That bill needed 284 votes to override.

Lawmakers in both parties charged that Trump’s unexpected vetoes shortly after Christmas were political retribution for people who had opposed his agenda.

Trump justified his veto of the water pipeline bill by calling Colorado Democrat Jared Polis a “bad governor.” State officials have refused to pardon former Republican election official Tina Peters for her convictions last year related to efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 president election, which Trump lost.

The president accused Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe, which would be allowed under the other bill to carry out construction projects to protect a village from flooding, of trying to obstruct his immigration policies by suing to stop a migrant detention center near their land.

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

The House passed three government spending bills Thursday, inching Congress closer to funding federal operations ahead of the Jan. 30 deadline to avoid a shutdown.

The measures would fund the departments of Energy, Commerce, Interior and Justice, as well as water programs, the EPA and federal science initiatives through the end of the current fiscal year. The bipartisan vote comes as a relief to Speaker Mike Johnson, who had to mount a real-time whip operation on the floor Wednesday when conservatives threatened to tank the procedural rule paving the way for consideration of the funding legislation that was originally intended to be brought up in a single package.

A dozen GOP fiscal hawks were prepared to vote “no” on the rule unless leadership agreed to remove certain earmarks from the underlying package — and promised to revamp the earmarks process surrounding future spending bills.

To quell the rebellion, a plan was hatched to split up the package and accommodate two separate votes: one on the Commerce-Justice-Science bill, where discontent over certain earmarks couldn’t be resolved, and another on the Interior-Environment and Energy-Water bills coupled together. This maneuver allowed hard-liners to register their opposition to the Commerce-Justice-Science measure but still support the others.

The House ultimately voted 375-47 on Commerce-Justice-Science, with three dozen Republicans opposing, as compared to the just three Republicans who opposed the Interior-EPA and Energy-Water measures on a 419-6 vote.

Members of both parties also agreed to nix one particularly controversial, $1 million earmark sought by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for a program in her district.

A third vote Thursday, 397-28, was on final passage and to approve sending the three measures over to the Senate reconstituted into a package. Majority Leader John Thune is eying consideration of this bundle as soon as next week.

“Going forward, we’re going to be allowed a little more access to the bills and the ability to have an impact on them in the future — this next tranche,” Rep. Andy Harris, a senior appropriator and House Freedom Caucus chair, told reporters.

But House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) defended the bills against the lamentations of conservatives.

“These bills are the product of bipartisan, bicameral consensus and are grounded in a member-driven process,” Cole said in a floor speech Thursday. “It wasn’t meant to be easy. In fact, difficulty is what separates serious legislating from political convenience.”

Appropriators are already working on the next spending package they hope to move in advance of the month-end funding cliff. Legislative text could come this weekend, Cole told reporters Wednesday ahead of a meeting of chairs for the Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations and Financial Services appropriations subcommittees.

“All the reports I’m getting are very good,” he added in a Wednesday interview. “We’re getting good cooperation from our Democratic friends as well. I mean, people are serious about trying to get this stuff done.”

But Cole and his colleagues have their work cut out for them in passing the rest of the full-year funding bills for fiscal 2026. There are six measures Congress has not yet advanced, and they include some of the diciest of the bunch — among them, Defense and Labor-HHS-Education, which make up nearly 70 percent of all federal discretionary spending.

And the DHS portion of the next funding package has likely gotten even more unwieldy following this week’s shooting of a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

The House Republican in charge of that account, Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada, acknowledged the events in Minnesota “will probably complicate the bill.”

The appropriations package advanced Thursday largely rejected the dramatic cuts requested by the White House, instead making more tailored spending reductions to energy and environment programs and those popular with Democrats.

The EPA would see a 4 percent, or $320 million, cut, instead of the more than $4 billion reduction President Donald Trump had sought. The National Park Service would face a moderate reduction from current funding levels, much less than the 37 percent cut the White House asked for.

One area set to get a boost are trade agencies, including an 18 percent increase for the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office and a 23 percent increase for the Commerce Department office responsible for designing and enforcing export controls used to target China and other countries.

Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.