🔗 Share this article

Oversight Panel

The House Oversight Committee has made public a set of roughly 70 photographs obtained from the property of late adjudicated sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

This represents the third such publication from a tranche of more than 95,000 photos the committee has acquired from Epstein's estate. It features pictures of quotes from the book Lolita scrawled across a female's body, and redacted images of female foreign passports.

This release arrives hours before the 19th of December due date for the Department of Justice to make public each documents connected to its inquiry into Epstein.

"These images pose additional queries about precisely what the Justice Department has in its holdings," remarked the senior Democrat of the panel, Robert Garcia.

What is in the Images Disclosed

Several of the images published on this week depict Epstein conversing with professor and activist Noam Chomsky on a personal aircraft; Bill Gates standing alongside a female whose face is redacted; Steve Bannon sitting at a table opposite Epstein, and ex- Alphabet president Sergey Brin at a dinner event.

Committee

These are the newest wealthy, influential men to be photographed in Epstein's estate photographs published by the House Oversight Committee - formerly released pictures also include US President Donald Trump and former president Bill Clinton, as well as director Woody Allen, former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, counsel Alan Dershowitz, Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor, and additional individuals.

Showing up in the photos is not indication of any wrongdoing, and several of the pictured figures have stated they were never involved in Epstein's illegal activity.

In a statement issued alongside the photograph release, Democratic members on the US House Oversight Committee noted the Epstein estate's representatives did not supply background information or timeframes for the pictures.

"Images were selected to provide the general populace with openness into a representative sample of the images received from the property, and to give perspectives into Epstein's network and his profoundly troubling behavior," the announcement reads.

Investigative Body

The disclosure also includes multiple photographs of excerpts from the Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita inscribed in dark ink across different parts of a female's body, like her chest, lower extremity, hip, and back. Lolita tells the account of a minor who was groomed by a older literature professor.

One excerpt from the work written across a female's torso states, "Lolita: the end of the tongue making a journey of three steps down the roof of the mouth to land, at three, on the teeth".

Additionally, there are a number of photos of women's identification and ID papers from nations worldwide, like Lithuania, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

Oversight Panel

A large portion of the data on the IDs, like identities and birth dates, is redacted but the committee said in a press release that the passports belong to "females whom Jeffrey Epstein and his conspirators were engaging".

An additional image shows Epstein seated at a desk closely in the company of three women whose features have been obscured - one has her hand on Epstein's torso under his clothing, and another individual is crouching to view a adjacent computer. Epstein appears to be assisting the third individual put on a wristband.

Investigative Body

Another photo released is a image of text messages from an unidentified individual who says they have been supplied "a number of girls" and are asking for "$one thousand dollars per girl".

Photo Disclosure Occurs Ahead of DOJ Cut-off

The panel has thousands of photographs in its possession from the Epstein estate, which are "at once graphic and ordinary," its statement on this week clarified.

The House Oversight Committee first issued a subpoena to the property of Epstein, who was found dead in a New York prison in 2019 while pending legal proceedings on charges of sex trafficking crimes, in August.

The images and files the Epstein property submitted to the committee are separate from what is largely referred to "Epstein-related records". That material are papers within the Department of Justice's possession associated with its separate probe into Epstein.

In accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Donald Trump made law recently, the DOJ has a deadline of 19 December to disclose its documents. The scope of what's found in the DOJ's files is unclear, and it's probable that a significant portion of the material will be extensively censored, akin to Congressional materials