House Oversight Committee Subpoenas Jeffrey Epstein’s Estate — Specifically Demanding 50th Birthday Book and Client List
New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP, File
The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the estate of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, seeking documents including the rumored “Epstein list” of his clients and a 50th birthday book compiled by his former girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Epstein died in prison in August 2019. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was convicted of one count of sex trafficking a minor, one count of transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and three counts of conspiracy. Multiple victims testified at Maxwell’s trial about how she not only recruited young women and underage girls to have sex with Epstein and other older men, but that Maxwell also sometimes assaulted them herself.
She recently spoke with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for two days in Tallahassee, Florida, at the maximum-security federal women’s prison where she was previously held before she was transferred to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Bryan, Texas, a minimum-security facility that is not commonly used to house inmates convicted of crimes as serious as hers. Redacted transcripts and audio clips from that interview were released last Friday.
Trump has insisted that The Wall Street Journal’s report about him submitting a lewd drawing of a nude woman for this birthday book was false and filed a lawsuit over it, and Maxwell claimed during her interview with Blanche that she did not remember Trump or any other specific contributors to the book because it had been so long.
A major problem facing President Donald Trump’s administration is that a lot of the outrage over the Epstein matter is coming from the right, from his own MAGA base. As The Washington Post’s Kadia Goba noted, there’s a vote expected in Congress next week to release additional documents, and Democrats criticized a previous batch of released documents for not including anything that was not already publicly known.
On Monday, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) announced he had “issued a subpoena to the Epstein estate for documents & communications in his possession, custody, or control in unreacted form,” as well as calling Alexander Acosta, the federal prosecutor who oversaw Epstein’s earlier case, for a “transcribed interview.”
A press release on the committee’s website noted that Acosta had agreed to appear voluntarily.
The subpoena requires the attorneys for Epstein’s estate to reply by noon ET on September 8, and demands a list of documents including “[a]ny document or record that could be reasonably construed to be a potential list of clients involved in sex, sex acts, or sex trafficking facilitated by Mr. Jeffrey Epstein,” and “[a]ll entries contained within the reported leather-bound book compiled by Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell for Mr. Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday.”
Other documents included in the subpoena include Epstein’s will; any nondisclosure agreements Epstein entered into with anyone since 1990 until his death, the 2007 non-prosecution agreement between Epstein and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida (Acosta’s former position), Epstein’s missed phone call logs and missed visitor logs, his address/contact books including “one reportedly referred to as a ‘Black Book,'” flight logs, bank and financial records, calendars, documents related to his various real estate properties, documents related to Epstein’s corporate entities, and “[a]ll documents and communications to or from and/or referring or relating to a list of 92 individuals in a lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell and “[a]ll Presidents and Vice Presidents of the United States not otherwise listed in…from January 1, 1990 through August 10, 2019” — a group that includes both Trump and President Bill Clinton, who was also known to have associated with Epstein, although he too denies any wrongdoing.
