Rep. Ro Khanna Urges Contempt Charges over AG Bondi's Epstein Redactions

The Justice Department is under fire over its initial release of files related to the serial convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, after it failed to publish thousands of documents by Friday's congressionally imposed deadline. The delay drew criticism from Epstein's survivors and members of Congress. Of the Epstein files turned over so far, more than 500 pages were entirely redacted, including all 119 pages of a document labeled Grand Jury and Why.

One notable document released Friday was a 1996 FBI complaint filed by Maria Farmer, who along with her sister Annie, was sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who's serving a 20-year sentence. In the report, Maria Farmer told the FBI of Epstein's interest in child pornography. For more than 30 years, the FBI never publicly acknowledged her report, never investigated her claims.

On Friday, Maria's sister Annie spoke to CNN.

My sister, Maria Farmer, reported Epstein and his crimes in 1996. We've been saying that over and over again. And part of what was released today was an official FBI form, and I think it was an FD-71, dated September 3rd, 1996. With my sister's, some of my sister's report, it was labeled under child pornography

and it described Epstein stealing photos of myself at the age of 16 and my younger sister who was 12 at the time. And just to see it in writing and to know that they had this document this entire time. And how many people were harmed after that date?

It just, you know, we've been saying it over and over, but to see it in black and white that way has been very emotional. I'm with Maria today. I know she felt a tremendous amount of relief and redemption but also sorrow in thinking about, you know,

people like Virginia Roberts Shufray who are not here to see this, and be a part of really forcing the government to be transparent, finally, about this case.

That was Annie Farmer speaking to CNN. At least 16 files related to Jeffrey Epstein disappeared from the Justice Department's public webpage over the weekend before reappearing amidst public outcry. The files included images of paintings depicting nude women and one showing a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein's longtime associate and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

We're joined right now, in studio for the first time by Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California, along with Republican Congressmember Thomas Massey. Ro Khanna co-wrote the Epstein-Files Transparency Act, which led to Friday's release. So the deadline, Congressmember Khanna, was December 19th. So talk about what was released and what wasn't released.

Not much new was released. Unfortunately, what they released was heavily redacted. They didn't release some of the key documents, the 60-count draft indictment that was prepared for Jeffrey Epstein. Ultimately, he was charged only on two counts. We had asked for that 60-count draft indictment.

The 82- This was the original one, the non-prosecution agreement.

The non-prosecution, the original indictment on what he should have been charged for. In Florida. In Florida. And then the 82-page memorandum trying to justify that. They didn't release that. So Massey and I, yesterday morning, said we were going to hold Pam Bondi in contempt. Since then, for 24 hours, they've been backpedaling.

They actually now have released an unredacted version of the New York grand jury testimony, the 119-page document that you referred. They're saying they're going to release more documents. They realize the public backlash.

So let's see what we get this week. So you've talked about possibly holding the attorney general, Pam Bondi, in contempt. It's also been floated that you might want to impeach her. What does each of these mean, and what's the deadline on each of these?

So the House can act unilaterally on contempt, and will be introduced by thomas massey what the uh... resolution will say is that for every day that pan bondi does not release the documents in question she will be subject to a personal five thousand dollar fine uh... and

there will be a committee of the congress republican and democrat that need to see the documents to determine whether that redaction qualifies as legitimate with the statute or not. We will be giving her a 30-day grace period to release the documents. But the interesting thing is that Massey has Republicans lined up as well to support this contempt. It's a privilege resolution. That means the speaker would have to give it a vote, and we're likely to introduce it

early in January. But the point is not just to pass it, just the announcement of doing so. And Pam Bondi's awareness that Republicans are upset has had them backpedaling. And all day yesterday, they've been tweeting out unredacted versions of previously redacted documents, explanations for why documents have been missing, and a commitment to be releasing more documents.

So you're talking about contempt, and you're saying only the House would have to approve that, not the Senate.

And what about impeachment? Impeachment is, of course, requires the Senate to convict. It would require a majority in the House. It's an option on the table. I think what she's doing is impeachable. But we would want to first do the contempt, and we would want to make sure that we have

the votes to be able to impeach. But what is on the table is the contempt, impeachment, and, frankly, a criminal referral in terms of obstruction of justice for violating the law, which would apply not just to her or Deputy Attorney General Blanche, but career prosecutors or Justice Department officials who have not complied with the letter of the law or the spirit of the law.

So you mentioned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. He appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday and was asked by Kristen Wilker about files relating to President Trump.

Let's delve more deeply into the redactions. Is any information about President Trump redacted in any of the files that have or will be released?

No, not unless it's supposed to be redacted under the law, which means victim information or any sort of privilege, like attorney-client privilege. But I have no reason to believe that the lawyers that were working on this case were talking about President Trump, because he had nothing to do with the Epstein files. He had nothing to do with the horrific crimes that Mr. Epstein committed. And so I don't expect there will be anything redacted.

But the short answer is, we are not redacting information around President Trump, around any other individual involved with Mr. Epstein.

So, that's the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche. Yes, the former personal attorney of the criminal attorney for President Trump. If you can talk about, for example, this photograph that was on the website, disappeared from the website, and then came back on, and Blanche talking about, well, they want to just protect survivors. It was a picture of Trump.

Explain the significance of this. It wasn't even particularly incriminating, and yet they removed it.

Well, it was not incriminating, because that picture had actually been out in the public domain before. What I can just think is that there were overzealous attorneys who were told or decided that they didn't want anything with Trump out there. And so they were vetting the material to protect Trump and then the outrage made them re-release it. But the biggest

issues is that in one case they released information about a survivor, maybe they did that accidentally, but they didn't release the survivors FBI file which she has been asking for decades. And the truth is, what do the American people want to know? They want to know who are the rich and powerful men who went to Epstein's rape island. Who are the people who either abused these young girls or watched at parties as young girls 14, 15 were paraded around naked and didn't say anything?

And that information is in the FBI files. That information is in those indictments and in the prosecution memorandum. And the question people are asking is, why are you not releasing this? Because it goes beyond Trump. It goes to a group of rich and powerful people who are engaged in heinous conduct or covering it up.

So, the Democrats have also been in charge of the House when they didn't release the Epstein files. Why the change?

Well, I think it was a miss for this whole country. I don't defend the idea that these survivors have been denied justice for over a decade. Now, Elijah Cummings had talked about this in 2019. I was on the committee. We had talked about having an investigation. But all of us should have acted with far greater urgency.

And as I have gotten to know now personally the survivors, I have become much more emotionally invested in this case, meeting people like Annie Farmer. And what happened to these young girls, because they were girls from working-class families who came, were often immigrants or didn't have a father, they were abused, and this country abandoned them. And that's a shame and an indictment on the country.

This is Amanda Roberts, the sister-in-law of the late Virginia Jofre, who was the first survivor to come out publicly against Epstein.

I think the law being passed is exactly why we wanted it to be passed, because now we can hold them accountable, because this is a law now, and we can hold them in contempt if they do decide to, you know, redact perpetrators, if they don't release the items that we know they need to release. And so we're gonna do our due diligence, you know,

between us, the survivors, the lawyers. We know what should be in there. And we're going to comb through every single page and we're going to hold them accountable. And so while we're extremely disappointed, while we're frustrated, there is also this sense of empowerment.

And every single survivor that I told them today, I said, the ball is in our court.

See, that's Amanda Roberts, the sister-in-law of the late Virginia Roberts Dufresne, who was a victim of Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and, of course, Andrew. We don't say Prince Andrew anymore, because after all of this, and she sued him, he's been stripped of his royal title. So many survivors have said it shouldn't be on them, though they have united, they're not giving up.

They've talked about putting out a list of the men whose names they knew.

They have. They came to the Capitol twice. They relived their trauma twice. That's the only reason Massey and my bill passed the House and the Senate. And they have said that they are many men who either abused them, raped them, trafficked them or covered it up.

I mean, think about it. There are 1,200 victims. It's not conceivable mathematically that one person abused or raped 1,200 people. There were more folks. They have described them in generalities to Massey and me. They fear, obviously, defamation suits and rich and powerful people coming after them.

It shouldn't be their obligation to release this. What they and their lawyers have said is, if you release the FBI files, if you release the draft indictments and the prosecution memo, the American people will know who these folks are.

Susan Wiles, in this famous now Vanity Fair article, in talking about this, I think she used the term—she said—Chris Whipple wrote the article. I think she—Wiley said—I think she completely, referring to Pam Bondi, whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this, Wile said of Bondi.

Well, she whiffed, and she's continuing to whiff. I mean, I imagine the White House was livid on Friday, because what Pam Bondi did on Friday was basically an extension of what she did five months ago. Put out documents in a document dump that really didn't tell us anything new. And I think they thought that we're headed to Christmas, Congress is out of session, Massey and I would just sort of say, okay, they complied with the law and let's move

on and declare a win. Instead, they were surprised that Massey and I actually care about these survivors. We don't just care about some kind of pro forma win. We want the actual documents out. And within hours, we said this is a betrayal, a gross betrayal of the spirit and letter of the law.

I have a question. Ghislaine Maxwell, in the days leading up to December 19th, a convicted associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has asked a federal court to vacate or amend her 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. Now, this isn't the same as a pardon. I was wondering if, by doing this—I'm not saying she's working in cahoots with

the administration—but by doing this, does this open up the possibility that they'll say, well, since she's asked the federal court to vacate or amend her sentence, they're reopening the case, and this would lead to many documents not being released.

It could be one of the reasons that they don't release some of the documents. But to put it in context, there are 300 gigabytes of documents. They've released 2.5 gigabytes. So when people say, ongoing investigations, could it prevent some documents from being released? Maxwell, could it prevent some documents from being released?

Maybe, but we're talking about 5 percent. Where are the other 95 percent of the documents? Where are the documents that three federal judges have ordered released without significant redaction?

So, the concern here is, what are they hiding and who are they protecting? So President Trump has provided over almost a monolithic Republican Party. But now there are cracks. And I think it very much started with the Epstein files, right? You have Congress members Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene and others who left the Republican Party to join the Democrats, I mean, just on this vote. Now, more than a tenth of the current Congress has indicated they will not return to their

seats after the midterms. We're talking about something like well over 40 senators and Congress members, and the majority of them are Republican. The significance of this?

Donald Trump is finally losing his MAGA base. This is the one issue, the Epstein files, where the MAGA base disapproves, overwhelmingly, of Donald Trump. And it goes to the question, whose side are you on? Are you on the side of these rich and powerful men who abused young girls and have elite impunity?

Or are you going to stand with abandoned young girls and the working class? And what the Republicans are starting to see is that Trump has betrayed his own base, that he's become part of the swamp that he railed against. And so, you now see, after this discharge petition, there are suddenly tons of discharge petitions in the Congress on all sorts of topics. People are willing to defy Speaker Johnson.

They're willing to defy Donald Trump. Many are thinking about a post-Trump future. If they have aspirations of a political career for the next 10 years, they're trying to position for their own careers and less about protecting Donald Trump.

The significance of Elise Stefanik not only pulling out of the New York Republican—the New York governor's race, but now ending her congressional career, at least for the moment.

Well, I took some satisfaction, because she was so over the top in the way she's gone after universities in this country. And she has been pandering to the worst elements of Trump's base. And yet, you know, now she's seeing the writing on the wall. She was not going anywhere in the New York governor's race. And she sees that they're going to lose the House majority in 2026.

So very quickly, going through a few other issues, and many do actually see them linked to Epstein, one after another, dramatic events of the Trump administration, perhaps to pull attention away, and, of course, Venezuela, one bombing after another that the Pentagon can't quickly enough release video, except when it comes to the second video of the September 2nd bombing, showing the two men who survived the first bombing. They will not release this at this point.

And today, Heg Seth and President Trump are expected to hold some kind of meeting announcement at Mar-a-Lago at 4.30 in the afternoon. What about the U.S. pursuing these oil tankers near Venezuela? The one that's Chinese-owned, Panamanian flag vessel named Sentries, was not under U.S. sanction. Is he trying to provoke a war with Venezuela?

Yes, it's of deep concern to me. He is basically trying to have a regime change war on Madero, trying to put pressure on Madero to step aside. The risk of having an incident that leads to war has increased. We have more destroyers in the region, in the Caribbean. We are striking boats.

We have Marines in Puerto Rico. We have Marines off the—on the coast of Florida. And I, being on the Armed Services Committee, have seen in a classified setting the second video. Some of us have said, release seen in a classified setting the second video. Some of us have said, release it. Release it for the American public.

But I have two concerns. First, why are we going into a regime change war when the president promised no endless wars? And, second, why is the American government, in my name, in your name, killing people on these boats without a clear standard of what they have done that justifies the death.

So how does Congress stop this?

We tried to pass a War Powers Resolution, McGovern, me, Massey, and we lost by a single vote. And so we need to get more Republicans and two Democrats convinced that we have to stop another regime change war. We've got to build that support in the Congress.

You're here in New York, Zoran Land. He is going to become mayor on January 1st, midnight of New Year's Eve. On the day he met President Trump at the White House, when President Trump said, he's not a jihadist—of course, that was actually simply an attack on Elise Stefanik, who always referred to Zoran Mamdani as a jihadist—on the day they met, Congress voted, took a vote against socialism, with many Democrats joining with Republicans.

Can you talk about the significance of this vote as vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus?

The problem with the vote is that there is a group of people like Zoran who call themselves Democratic Socialists. I call myself a progressive capitalist—but democratic socialism does not mean that you're going to seize the means of production. What they're talking about is taxing billionaires more, which I agree with, and having things like Medicare for all, free public college.

And in providing resolutions that are condemning that, What they are doing is condemning a part of a coalition that wants to tackle income inequality and hold wealth more accountable.

And this affordability agenda, it's a real challenge to Republicans, to President Trump himself, but it's also a challenge to many Democrats. For example, the leader of—the Democratic leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer, who never endorsed Zora Mandani. What is your message to Democrats across the country as a former head of what the campaign of Bernie Sanders, who

very much endorses Narendra Modi? Well, my message to Chuck Schumer was step down as minority leader. You're out of touch with the Democratic base. But my broader message is you cannot have a group of elites who are piling up wealth. In my district in Silicon Valley, $18 trillion of wealth, Amy, one-third of the entire national stock market is in my district. We need to tax billionaires.

We need to tax that wealth. We need to have Medicare for all. We need to have $10 a day child care. We need to stop Wall Street from buying single-family homes. We need a living wage. We need free public college and free trade schools. We need a Marshall Plan for America's economic development. It's not just about mouthing the words affordability.

It's about changing an economic system that has accumulated wealth in the hands of a few and abandoned working and middle class Americans across this country, I believe that we need an FDR-like, bold, progressive economic agenda. I call it new economic patriotism. But people like Zoran, people like Bernie Sanders, others, Greg Kazar, Pramila Jaipal, many of us are working towards that for a Democratic Party that is actually going to

live up to those ideals.

And finally, President Trump renaming Trump-Kennedy Center for the Arts. The sign has already gone up. I thought it was the Congress who named the Kennedy Center.

It is the Congress. I mean, he is violating the congressional law, but that hasn't stopped him. But I think, finally, people are catching on that Donald Trump is just acting all about himself. It's about his name on things. It's about his family making money. It's about his ego and it's not about the American people.

And my belief is after Trump, we're actually gonna want leaders who put the people first, who maybe aren't showmen, aren't bombastic, aren't all about themselves, but are listeners, more humility. One of the great presidents in my lifetime was Jimmy Carter. I got to intern for him at the Carter Center.

And I think his model of being a servant leader, humility, morality, my hope is that the country will go back to those kind of leaders across the country.

Frohkaneh, I want to thank you for being with us. Frohkaneh, I want to thank you for being with us. A Democratic congressmember from California co-authored the Epstein-Files Transparency I'm Amy Goodman.