Why you may not see the full Epstein story

Ken Klippenstein - [In] the Jeffrey Epstein files, one glaring loophole will prevent full transparency. It’s called national security.

Not national security that has anything to do with the national defense or harm to the nation, but the self-serving kind that protects the system from the people by depriving them of information — in this case about Jeffrey Epstein, his 1,000+ victims according to the government, and any accomplices he had. With 89 percent of Americans in agreement that the Justice Department should release all information about Epstein(!), the message is clear: national security is more important than democracy.

Take a look at Congress’ long-shot attempt to force the release of the government’s records, led by Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie. A seemingly innocuous word appears in the resolution: “unclassified.”

It is an official word that in theory only exists when it comes to national security matters; that is, that the release of such information could cause “harm” to the national security...

And yet somehow the word made its way into the Epstein Files Transparency Act....

The bill says that if the Attorney General “makes a determination that covered information may not be declassified and made available in a manner that protects the national security of the United States, including methods or sources related to national security, the Attorney General shall release an unclassified summary for each of the redacted or withheld classified information.” As in, the Attorney General would get to decide what to release and how to characterize it.

Asked what their rationale was for including the “unclassified” word, neither Khanna nor Massie responded to a request for comment as of publication. It’s entirely possible that they (or their staffers and lawyers) didn’t even think about whether there were alternatives to using the language of national security, but it is more likely that the Justice and FBI liaison officers on the Hill helped craft acceptable language.

Asked by independent journalist Michael Tracey about a similar carveout for “national defense” information in earlier legislation back in September, Massie’s reply was basically that he had no choice.

Massie said:

    “You have to put that in there if you’re going to get them to sign it … It’s not something I would sit and say, let’s put that in there. It’s something that, when you run the bill past other colleagues and say, ‘Can you sign this? In fact, can you get every Democrat to sign it?’ It’s one of the things that was felt was necessary to put in there.”

It all sounds procedural, but the resolution consequently falls prey to the national security doctrine that seems to be infecting every corner of American life. And Massey’s explanation gives a sense of how reflexively officials show deference to the logic of national security.

The truth is that the rich and powerful (including the FBI) are ultimately going to be protected from those who are clamoring for change. They aren’t hiding behind national security. They are national security.

The Epstein files released by the House Oversight Committee last week are dwarfed by the Justice Department and FBI’s over 300 gigabytes of information they say they’ve amassed from their review of all of their internal Epstein-related materials. Earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel said that their agencies had completed an “exhaustive review” of its holdings, an effort that reportedly involved over 1,000 FBI agents.

The Justice Department alluded to the sheer size of the effort in a press release, saying:

    “Teams of agents, analysts, attorneys, and privacy and civil liberties experts combed through the digital and documentary evidence with the aim of providing as much information as possible to the public while simultaneously protecting victims.”