Attorney General Pam Bondi informed congressional leaders Saturday that the Department of Justice has released every record in its possession related to the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases, completing the mandate of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Her letter, addressed to the chairs and ranking members of both the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, included a list of more than 300 high-profile names drawn from the released materials.
The names span politics, entertainment, tech, and royalty. Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Prince Harry, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Woody Allen, Kim Kardashian, Bruce Springsteen — even Kurt Cobain, who died in 1994 — all appear on the list.
Before anyone leaps to conclusions, Bondi's letter made clear that appearing on the list does not mean what the internet will inevitably claim it means.
"All persons where (1) they are or were a government official or politically exposed person and (2) their name appears in the files released under the Act at least once."
That's the threshold. Mentioned once, in any context, in any document — and you made the list. Some names surfaced in press clippings bundled into the files. Others appeared in documents that, on their face, had nothing to do with Epstein or Maxwell's crimes. The inclusion of Kurt Cobain should tell you everything about how wide the net was cast.
Bondi's letter described a comprehensive dump covering nine categories of records, documents, communications, and investigative materials. The DOJ submitted filings to the courts of the Southern District of New York — the jurisdiction that handled the Epstein and Maxwell prosecutions — and released materials pursuant to those courts' related orders.
The redactions that remain were narrow and specific:
Victims and their legal counsel were consulted during the redaction process. That matters. Transparency is the point, but not at the expense of people who were exploited, as Fox News reports.
Bondi drove a stake through one particular conspiracy theory — the idea that the government shielded the powerful from embarrassment:
"No records were withheld or redacted 'on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.'"
No special treatment. No quiet favors for anyone who could pick up the phone and call Washington.
The list will dominate social media for weeks. That's inevitable. But the letter itself distinguishes between names that carry real evidentiary weight and names that are functionally noise. Bondi acknowledged that some individuals had "extensive direct email contact with Epstein or Maxwell," while others were merely mentioned "in a portion of a document (including press reporting) that on its face is unrelated to the Epstein and Maxwell matters."
That distinction is everything. And it's one that most commentary will flatten into oblivion.
The files connect to Epstein's alleged trafficking and financial operations across corporate, nonprofit, academic, and governmental spheres. The scope of his network — or at least the scope of his name-dropping — touched almost every elite institution in American life. The question was never whether the names would be shocking. The question was whether the government would actually release them.
Now it has.
For years, the Epstein files existed as a symbol of everything wrong with America's two-tiered justice system. The rich and connected operated behind a wall of sealed documents, nondisclosure agreements, and institutional inertia. Prosecutors cut deals. Courts sealed records. The media — which now lectures the public about democracy dying in darkness — showed remarkably little curiosity about who visited that island and what happened there.
Bondi acknowledged the sheer volume of the task and the speed at which the DOJ moved to comply:
"Any omissions from the list are unintentional and, as explained in the previous letters to Congress, a result of the volume and speed with which the Department complied with the Act."
That's an honest disclosure, not a hedge. The DOJ prioritized compliance with the law over bureaucratic caution. Previous administrations had every opportunity to do what Bondi just did. They chose not to.
The letter landed on the desks of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member Dick Durbin, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, and Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. Bipartisan distribution. No games about who gets to see what first.
The release of the names is not the end of the story. It's the end of the cover-up. The files now exist in public — searchable, citable, available to journalists and investigators who want to do the work of separating incidental mentions from meaningful connections.
The reference to active federal investigations and ongoing prosecutions buried in the redaction criteria is worth noting. Something is still alive. Names redacted for law-enforcement sensitive purposes aren't on the public list, which means the DOJ is still working threads that lead somewhere. That's the real story underneath the celebrity-name spectacle.
Epstein's network didn't just involve parties and private jets. It allegedly spanned trafficking and financial operations woven through the most prestigious institutions in the country. The files released under this Act — records surrounding his detention, his death, the investigation, the prosecutions — represent the most complete accounting the public has ever received.
The powerful spent years making sure these documents stayed buried. They aren't buried anymore.
