A staffer in the Justice Department said in a secretly recorded video that the department would redact any Republican names from its investigative files on the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
The administration has been funneling the Epstein files to Capitol Hill in a supposed show of transparency, but only liberals’ names will remain visible, the staffer said.
“If they’re released in any way, it’s going to be very redacted. They’ll redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal Democratic people in those files,” Joseph Schnitt, acting deputy chief of the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations, says in the video.
Schnitt apparently thought he was speaking to someone he’d met through a dating app, but he was actually talking to an undercover operative for the right-wing entrepreneur James O’Keefe.
The video is the most recent and possibly one of the most damaging instances of conservative backlash against the Trump administration over its refusal to make the Epstein files public. Earlier this year, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had Epstein’s mythical “client list” on her desk, only to backtrack this summer and announce no new information would ever come out.
In response to O’Keefe publishing the video online Thursday, the Justice Department essentially confirmed the video is authentic, posting a statement from Schnitt saying he was speaking only based on what he’d read in the media.
“The comments I made were my own personal comments on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done at or learned via work,” Schnitt wrote.
In a separate statement, the department said the “comments in this video have absolutely zero bearing with reality and reflect a total lack of knowledge of the DOJ’s review process.”
The video is typical O’Keefe fare, in that it snags someone from a low or middle tier of an institution being prodded into unflattering statements about the organization. Schnitt’s statements do track with recent public reporting and speculation about the files.
Trump was friends with Epstein for years and is reportedly mentioned repeatedly in the files. The department reportedly had hundreds of staffers poring over the documents, in part to flag instances of Trump’s name.
Amid the uproar over the Trump administration’s refusal to release the documents, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena, and the department has handed over some material that the committee began making public this week.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who is leading a separate effort to pass a law requiring the material to be released, told HuffPost this week the Justice Department is giving the Oversight Committee heavily “curated” material that’s filled with unnecessary redactions.
Spokespeople for the committee did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday. The Justice Department said it’s “committed to transparency and is in compliance with the House Oversight Committee’s request for documents.”
In his own analysis accompanying the raw video, O’Keefe said the fact that Schnitt said the Epstein files would be redacted to favor Republicans means he “probably leans Democrat.” But he questioned the administration’s backtracking on releasing the files.
“Why is there suddenly this internal conflict within the same administration that aggressively campaigned in 2024 to fully release the Epstein files to the American public?” he said. “What new revelations did the DOJ and FBI make now say that an incriminating client list does not exist?”