By Darren Lyn
HOUSTON, United States (AA) - US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) delivered thousands of pages of files related to disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
In an interview with Fox News, Bondi said the FBI handed over a "truckload" of documents to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) by her hard deadline of last Friday at 8 a.m. EST after the original release of around 100 documents revealed nothing that the public did not already know.
"A source had told me where the documents were being kept, Southern District of New York, shock," Bondi told Fox News. "Thousands of pages of documents. I have the FBI going through them...and Director (Kash) Patel is going to get us a detailed report as to why the FBI withheld all of those documents."
Bondi said the DOJ is going to comb through the thousands of Epstein files carefully and emphasized that a detailed report would eventually be released to the public.
"We're going to go through it, go through it as fast as we can, but go through it very cautiously to protect all the victims of Epstein," said Bondi, who accused former President Joe Biden's administration of "sitting" on the documents.
"No one did anything with them. And why were they sitting in the Southern District of New York? I want a full report on that," she said. "You know, sadly, these people don't believe in transparency. But I think more unfortunately, I think a lot of them don't believe in honesty."
The highly-anticipated release of the Epstein documents was made public last Thursday, disappointing those who were expecting a so-called smoking gun of a specific client list that would shed more insight into Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring based in Palm Beach, Florida. Names like Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Alec Baldwin, Dustin Hoffman and Ivanka Trump were listed, but those names were previously released and none of them were ever implicated in any of Epstein's illegal sex trafficking allegations.
Epstein killed himself in his New York jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. His convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the sex trafficking operation.
"It's a new day. It's a new administration, and everything's going to come out to the public," said Bondi. "The public has the right to know. Americans have a right to know."