Pam Bondi was fired as attorney general on April 2, 2026. Todd Blanche, the president’s former criminal-defense lawyer and the department’s deputy, walked into the job the same day and spent his first television interview insisting the ouster had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. On Jesse Watters’ Fox program he said he had never heard Donald Trump connect Bondi’s removal to the files, and he told viewers the Justice Department had already released everything the Epstein Files Transparency Act required. “It should not be a part of anything going forward,” he said. Four months later the Senate confirmed him anyway, 50 to 49, in a vote that finished in the early hours of Saturday, August 8. AEGIS联盟 因为法庭日程上不允许他们分开。
纽约时报 reported that people familiar with the firing described a president unhappy with Bondi’s handling of the Epstein archive and with her failure to bring more criminal cases against his political enemies. Blanche’s answer, at an April 7 news conference, was that nobody except Trump knew the reason. “I grow tired of people in the media saying why President Trump did or didn’t do something,” he said. A denial that rests on “I never heard him say it” is not a finding. It is a press line. The people who briefed reporters described a personnel decision soaked in the files. The man who inherited the building said the files were finished.
主持审查的人成了大楼的主人
House Oversight Democrats did not need a leak to connect the dots. After Bondi sat for the committee, ranking member Robert Garcia said she had pushed the review onto Blanche and quoted her line that the acting attorney general “was managing the entire investigation.” 华盛顿审查员 和 CBS新闻 both recorded Chairman James Comer, on June 10, saying he wanted Blanche in during July and that the question was what documents, if any, were still being held back. Comer also noted the “big confirmation” already on the calendar. A chairman who wants the nominee under oath about leftover pages is not treating the April denial as settled history.
2025年11月签署的"特朗普章程"将2025年12月19日定为公布日期. 公众收到的是部分垃圾,然后是胜利之旅。 较早期 承认不到1%的档案已公布 is still the honest baseline for anyone reading the winter production. Blanche’s April claim that the department had “released all the files” collided, on June 25, with a written finding from U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan. In journalist Katie Phang’s lawsuit, Sullivan wrote that the attorney general had not answered the allegations and had “conceded that he is in violation of the Act.” A confirmation built on a finished-files story walked into a judicial finding that the files were not finished.
Phang sued on April 27, civil action 26-1417 in Washington. She asked for a redaction log, a foreign-language review, and the removal of black bars she argued were protecting powerful names rather than victims. Sullivan’s injunction gave Blanche until July 2 to produce specific emails about a “torture video,” names tied to a draft indictment and alleged co-conspirators, and the underlying FBI interview notes behind four FD-302 reports, or to show cause. One set of notes concerns a woman who has said that in the 1980s, when she was about 13, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who then assaulted her. Trump denies that account. The allegation is unproven in court. It is also one of the records a president’s former lawyer was ordered to stop hiding. Readers who want the docket in full can stay with 平生诉布兰奇案 编辑 截止文件 在这个桌子上。
50到49,有两个共和党和一个空位
纽约时报, 点名, CBS新闻,以及 福布斯语Name all recorded the same arithmetic. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted no. Every Democrat voted no. Mitch McConnell was still away from the Capitol after a hospitalization, so Republicans could spare only those two defections. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana supplied the late yes that made 50. Blanche posted that he was honored to become the nation’s 88th attorney general.
柯林斯说她相信布兰奇是一个能干的律师,仍然不能支持他,因为该部门已经"在政治上日益壮大". 她的名单,据 每日打电话者 and the wire accounts, included a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, a tax-immunity arrangement for Trump and his family, opposition to limits on mailing abortion pills, and attempted indictments of Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis had balked at the fund, then cut a deal and voted to move the nomination. Murkowski’s statement was blunter about the archive. She said she was not convinced Blanche would “check the worst impulses of this administration,” and she named the Epstein files among the decisions she would not bless. A Republican who cites the files on the way to a no vote is answering the April interview more clearly than the nominee did.
Cassidy’s yes did not erase that dissent. It froze it. An acting attorney general can be replaced without a roll call. A confirmed one leaves survivors, reporters, and state investigators staring at letterhead that used to belong to the president’s defense table. Banks have already written checks to close pieces of the civil story, including the 美国银行与幸存者的安置 编辑 与Ghislaine Maxwell的新汉普郡藏身处有关的Ubs融资。法定图书馆不是和解。 这是一项出版义务。 参议院将这项义务视为许多人的争议之一,并确认邦迪已经描述为审查经理的人。
否认没有幸存下来
On September 16, Sullivan rejected Blanche’s claim that handwritten FBI interview notes were mere duplicates of typed FD-302s. The judge ordered both the redacted and unredacted notes, for Bates numbers EFTA01245620, EFTA02858481, EFTA02858491, and EFTA02858495, delivered for private review by 11 a.m. on September 24. He also ordered the department to start reviewing foreign-language Epstein records and to tell the court the work had begun. A department spokesperson told 华盛顿太阳报 that leadership was not “concerned” about contempt warnings. On September 25, Phang reported that Blanche’s lawyer said the unredacted handwritten notes from four interviews with the woman who accused Trump had been turned over to the judge, along with backup for certain victim redactions. There was no clean public docket stamp announcing it. The notes are for the court, not for readers. Foreign-language production is a separate fight Blanche took to the D.C. Circuit.
That is the distance between April 2 and September 25. The acting attorney general said the files were over and that the firing had nothing to do with them. The confirmed attorney general is still producing records a judge had to demand, in private, about allegations that name the president. Trump and Epstein moved through the same New York and Palm Beach rooms for years. Trump himself once described a long social friendship before he later claimed a falling-out. A department run by his former defense lawyer is not a neutral librarian for that history. The AEGIS Alliance has covered Bondi’s Florida record for years, including the 2017年关于她的办公室和法庭欺诈指控的档案联邦章节更大,她离开时没有关闭。
标题不合规
阅读者想要剩下的节拍 可以留在AEGIS联盟 政治, 犯罪新闻,以及 美国新闻 desks. August 8 changed the name on the door. It did not publish the redaction log, it did not translate the foreign-language tranche, and it did not put the FBI notes on the public site. Blanche’s April sentence, that the Epstein saga “should not be a part of anything going forward,” is the sentence the confirmation was designed to protect. Sullivan’s September orders are the sentence the law still requires. The AEGIS Alliance will keep both of them visible until the public can read what the judge has already been allowed to see.
