Swalwell: Congress ‘Can Restrict Funding to the Department of Justice’ Over Epstein Files

Sunday on MS NOW’s “The Weekend,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) said Congress could defund the Justice Department over its partial release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Host Laura Barron-Lopez said, “They’ve been slow walking the release of the documents that they have had. Is there any conversation going on amongst lawmakers on House Judiciary, which you sit on, about holding the president or the Justice Department or Attorney General Pam Bondi accountable on this?”

Swalwell said, “It’s not as if there was, you know, a big surprise that, you know, we’d be seeking these documents. And in fact, the attorney general had referenced about eight months ago that asked, and why where these documents have just been found, had documents that she wasn’t aware of back then. So just imagine if you’re a career prosecutor and you went to the Department of Justice, you know, to, put bad guys away, stop public corruption, fight terrorism, and now you find yourself scrubbing through, you know, a million documents to keep the president’s name, you know, redacted and disconnected from the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker. That’s what DOJ, lawyers and FBI agents are doing right now. But to the earlier question, yes, every member of the Judiciary Committee, every Republican, every Democrat voted to release these documents and to have them in our hands yesterday. Not today, not tomorrow. Yesterday, they were supposed to be in our hands so that we could stand up for victims and to make sure that we know the names of the people who enabled Jeffrey Epstein.”

He added, “They have not done that yet. So here’s what we can do. We can restrict funding to the Department of Justice. Of course, we can bring officials in under inherent contempt. But also, what we can do is we can bring them in for hearings. And I would recommend that’s the best thing that we could do is to have a public account and to put them in the witness chair and ask, just where the hell are these files? And why are you keeping Donald Trump’s name to the degree that you are, out of them?”

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