The Justice Department says it has agreed to provide Congress with documents from its investigation into the dead serial sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The House Oversight Committee is set to begin receiving the files on Friday, after it subpoenaed all records and communications from the case files of Epstein and his longtime co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. On Monday, Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr gave a deposition to the Oversight Committee about Jeffrey Epstein after he, too, was subpoenaed. The committee, however, has not issued a subpoena to Alex Acosta, President Trump’s former labor secretary, who, as a U.S. attorney in Florida in 2008, approved a nonprosecution agreement that shut down the federal probe into Epstein’s sex trafficking ring and allowed Epstein to serve little time in prison.
Meanwhile, in a highly unusual move, the Trump administration announced this week it had tapped Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to be co-deputy director of the FBI. He’ll serve alongside Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and right-wing podcaster whom Trump previously tapped as the FBI’s second-in-command. Bailey’s appointment comes after Bongino publicly clashed with Attorney General Pam Bondi and threatened to resign over the Trump administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files.