Former Vice President Kamala Harris defended former President Joe Biden’s administration’s decision on Wednesday to not release the files surrounding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Harris said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” that former administration officials like herself respected the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) own independent decision to not release the files. The current DOJ is required to release all unclassified files related to Epstein by Friday to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Nov. 19.
“To give you an answer that will not satisfy your curiosity, I will tell you we, perhaps to our damage, but we strongly and rightly believed that there should be an absolute separation between what we wanted as an administration and what the Department of Justice did,” Harris said. “We absolutely adhered to that and it was right to do that. The Justice Department would make its decisions independent of any political or personal vendetta or concern that we may have and that’s the way it worked.”
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The files garnered national attention in July after the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded that Epstein did not possess a client list and that he killed himself in his jail cell. The memo was an abrupt end to the investigation after Attorney General Pam Bondi stated that she had the client list on her desk for review.
Trump initially said that the calls to release the files were a Democratic hoax, though he later changed his tune by saying Republicans had nothing to hide. Epstein’s former business partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that she never witnessed Trump engage in any inappropriate acts during his friendship with Epstein.
Victims of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring told NBC News’ Hallie Jackson in September that they never witnessed or had any knowledge of Trump committing any wrongdoing.
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