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California Representative Robert Garcia urged FBI and Department of Justice employees who are angry about the Trump administration’s redactions of the Epstein files to come forward – noting there are whistleblower protections to ensure the truth gets out.
Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, slammed the Trump administration for saying for months that the files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were ready to be released – only to heavily redact the materials and miss the legal deadline for releasing them in full.
“To spend this entire period of time, the last few months, claiming that you have the files ready to be released… And then this all-out effort to hide them from the public, to stop the will of Congress, to not answer the oversight subpoena. What they need to understand is that there are hundreds of FBI agents and others that are good American patriots that have worked to put these files together. They know what is in them,” Garcia said Sunday on MS NOW.
Garcia urged anyone at the FBI or Department of Justice who worked on the Epstein files – who believes their work is currently being hidden – to come forward to the Oversight Committee.
“If you are a whistleblower at the FBI, at the Department of Justice, if you worked hard to put the files together and are seeing your work now being hidden by your own Department of Justice, contact the Oversight Committee,” Garcia said.
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Rep. Robert Garcia urged FBI and Department of Justice whistleblowers to come forward to the Oversight Committee, urging those with knowledge of what the files related to Jeffrey Epstein contained to speak with lawmakers (Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images)
The California Democrat continued: “We have whistleblower protections. We want to make sure that the truth gets out, that the survivors are protected.”
“We are hearing from folks across our government who have seen or know what are in these files, and we want you to know that you will be protected. We want that information and the American public deserves the truth,” he concluded.
At least 16 files disappeared Saturday from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Epstein – including a photograph showing Trump – less than a day after they were posted.
The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs on top of a desk and in drawers.
In that image, inside a drawer, among other photos, was a photograph of President Donald Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump, and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
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Included in the files taken off the website Saturday was a photo that featured Trump (DOJ)
The unexpectedly missing files fueled online speculation over what was taken down, and what may be being covered up as a result.
The Trump administration has received backlash from both sides of the aisle after Congress ordered the Justice Department to release all files related to the Epstein case by Friday, and the department only made a small fraction of the materials publicly available.
The files released Friday offered sparse new information about disgraced financier Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting his sex trafficking trial.
Fresh accusations of a cover-up have since emerged after the photograph featuring the president was taken down from the Epstein files library over the weekend.