President Donald Trump's administration is protecting at least six of convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirators, lawmakers alleged on Monday.
Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and Thomas Massie (R-KY) were among the lawmakers permitted to review what were supposed to be unredacted versions of the Epstein files on Monday. Instead, lawmakers reviewed documents of which 70% and 80% contained redactions that Trump's FBI was supposed to remove by law. Some of the files mentioned names of six co-conspirators, all of whom were redacted, the lawmakers said.
Massie told Politico that one of the co-conspirators appeared to be a U.S. citizen, two others were from foreign countries, and the nationalities of the rest of the co-conspirators were unknown.
“What we’re after is the men who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women to,” Massie told the outlet, adding that it was time for Trump's Department of Justice to "correct its mistakes" in handling the files.
The lawmakers blasted the Trump administration for redacting the names while publicly releasing the names of victims.
"A lot of it was smoke and mirrors," Khanna told the MeidasTouch Network.
"There's no excuse for releasing survivors' names while protecting these six men," he added.
Raskin didn't hold back when he spoke to Politico about the files.
"We didn’t want to see any redactions of the names of co-conspirators, accomplices, enablers, abusers, rapists, simply to spare them potential embarrassment, political sensitivity or disgrace of some kind,” Raskin said “And yet nonetheless, the Epstein … documents that were released are filled with redactions of names and information about people who clearly are not victims and may fall into that other category.”