Boy, is that a beautiful live picture just before the top of the hour on a Friday morning, looking down at the Mall in Washington from the top of the Washington... You know what it needs is a gigantic arch, and that's what needs to be done, and it's coming time.
So the Justice Department's chief internal watchdog says it is investigating the DOJ's compliance with a law requiring the release of millions of pages of material linked to Jeffrey Epstein. The audit comes after months of complaints from members of Congress that the department has failed to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act by withholding documents about Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. DOJ officials previously have said they did their best to follow the law's disclosure requirements.
Joining us now, former litigator and MSNBC senior legal reporter Lisa Rubin, and publisher of the newsletter The Ink, Substack, MSNBC political analyst Anand Giridharadas. He's out with a new installment of his series on what he calls the Epstein Class. Good morning to you both. Lisa, I think people, perhaps because of the Iran war, and perhaps some have suggested by design, will forget that the Epstein files was front and center at the conversation two months ago before this war started. So what do we learn from this latest development about these ongoing discussions around the Transparency Act, reminding people again, it is a matter of law that these documents be released?
It is a matter of law, and as you noted, not only members of Congress, but survivors and their lawyers have been somewhat up in arms about the ways in which these files were produced, complaining about redactions that were made that shouldn't have been made, all sorts of violations of victim privacy that are splashed across these pages. And of course, three million pages of documents that the acting attorney general told us existed but yet have been withheld. He says they were withheld perfectly, lawfully, but one of the reasons he says they were withheld was on grounds of privilege, privilege that belongs, he says, to the Department of Justice. That's not a grounds for withholding in the Act.
So now we have this announcement from the inspector general at the Department of Justice saying they're going to do sort of an audit of how these documents were reviewed, collected, produced, redacted, and withheld, as well as looking at what happened in the aftermath when victims and their lawyers came forward. How did the department respond to those complaints? I heard from survivors and their lawyers yesterday notes of cautious optimism about, I thought this was a good thing, until I spoke to a former inspector general, Michael Bromwich, who explained to me that an audit is sort of the lowest level review that an inspector general can do.
And one of the things that it doesn't include is sort of a 360 review by interviewing high-ranking people at the department. That's because an audit is designed to sort of suss out, is there a problem and how do you solve it? It's not, was there misconduct going on here for which individual people are responsible? That will be a big disappointment to survivors and their lawyers, as well as members of Congress, if that's how this review turns out.
At least, I was going to ask you if you had any initial reaction from survivors and their attorneys, but also, as you know, what faith do they or you have that the Department of Justice, this will be even if a low-level audit, would be on the up and up when we know that, you know, in Trump 2.0 in particular, they have purged so many of the career officials and installed just loyalists.
Well, let me give you the good news first. The good news is that the acting inspector general is someone who's been at the Department of Justice for 40 years. He was a 20-year veteran of DOJ as a prosecutor, then he went to the inspector general's office where he's been since 2007. So people need not worry that the person who's in charge of this audit is somehow some low-level political appointee. On the other hand, the very contents of an audit are, as Mr. Bromwich told me yesterday, not designed to get at the heart of what I think survivors and their lawyers are concerned about.
That having been said, I heard from a bunch of survivors and their lawyers yesterday, and the reaction was mixed. Danny Benski, who's been on our air a lot, is a very prominent and forward-facing survivor, told me it's amazing news, a little, I think it's a little spark of hope. But then I heard from Eric Fudale, who with his partner Lisa Bloom represents about 10 Epstein survivors, and his response I think was very pointed and maybe appropriately so. With the hopes that this is not just another partisan performance for this administration to pretend they care about Epstein survivors, I look forward to reviewing what the audit recovers from this clear attempt at thwarting.
I think the reason Eric says that is in all of the storm and drang about the Epstein files, we have not seen high-level people at the Department of Justice put themselves forward to meet with or talk to Epstein survivors. Very famously, the former attorney general, Pam Bondi, wouldn't turn around at a congressional hearing to look at them. And so when people say, I want to make sure this isn't another partisan performance at pretending we care about them, there is some predicate for a statement like that.
Yeah, and the concern is that this is just a token move so they can say they did something. So Anand, in the fifth and final piece of your series on what you call the Epstein Class, and a lot of people are calling it now, you detail what you say makes these people so powerful. Anand writes this: Is this in the end what we'll talk about, what we might learn from the Epstein files, that these people do their kabuki fighting in public and have each other's backs in private when stuff gets real? And we live lives with many... I don't think we have any of the same challenges, but imagine our neighbors to be as bloodthirsty and ignorant of the world as an uncontacted tribe of cannibals. Nothing can reach those... We have no sense of mercy for each other that the Epstein class displays for its own. That mercy in their case comes from class solidarity. It comes from the solidarity of patriarchy, and in their abiding mutual support, they encourage us through the media organs they own, through the social media platforms whose algorithms they code, through the political levers they operate, to keep bickering. Our... their impunity. Expand on that a little more if you would on it.
