{"id":18005,"date":"2026-01-21T16:01:51","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/judge-denies-lawmaker-request-for-independent-monitor-to-oversee-epstein-files-release\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:01:51","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T16:01:51","slug":"judge-denies-lawmaker-request-for-independent-monitor-to-oversee-epstein-files-release","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/judge-denies-lawmaker-request-for-independent-monitor-to-oversee-epstein-files-release\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge denies lawmaker request for \u2018independent monitor\u2019 to oversee Epstein files release"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A federal judge on Wednesday denied a request<\/a> by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to appoint an independent monitor<\/a> to oversee the Justice Department\u2019s disclosure of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, while conceding the lawmakers have raised \u201clegitimate concerns\u201d about the department\u2019s compliance with the law.<\/p>\n

In a 7-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer wrote that his supervision of the criminal case against Epstein\u2019s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell doesn\u2019t grant him \u201cany charter to supervise\u201d<\/a> whether the Justice Department meets its legal obligation to disclose the files.<\/p>\n

But he noted that his order didn\u2019t foreclose the lawmakers\u2019 right to sue over the matter. And Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, added that both the lawmakers and victims \u201craise legitimate concerns about whether DOJ is faithfully complying with federal law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Massie and Khanna authored the law Congress passed late last year mandating the department to make millions of pages of materials related to the late convicted sex offender public by Dec. 19. Instead, the department released a few tranches of material in late December but has disclosed in court filings that millions of additional pages<\/a> remain unreleased.<\/p>\n

In addition to the disclosure delays, the lawmakers have complained that the Justice Department has improperly redacted certain information from the files.<\/p>\n

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misspelled Paul Engelmayer’s name.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A federal judge on Wednesday denied a request by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to appoint an independent monitor to oversee the Justice Department\u2019s disclosure of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, while conceding the lawmakers have raised \u201clegitimate concerns\u201d about the department\u2019s compliance with the law. In a 7-page opinion, U.S. District […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}