Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) claimed President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has been “engaged in an effort to basically protect pedophiles” tied to Jeffrey Epstein — and suggested the president is among the sex criminals being safeguarded.
Fernandez made the provocative claim during an interview with Al Sharpton on MS NOW on Sunday. Her interview came one day after Attorney General Pam Bondi said the DOJ has released “all” Epstein-related files, as mandated by federal law, and explained why some names and images were redacted in the millions of documents.
Sharpton said he wanted Fernandez’s reaction to Bondi’s announcement, which listed a number of government officials and “politically exposed persons” who were mentioned in the files.
Those names included Trump, ex-President Joe Biden, Tucker Carlson, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former President Barack Obama, and Vice President JD Vance, among many others. Bondi wrote those names appear in a “wide variety of contexts,” from people emailing Epstein and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell to people who were merely mentioned in the messages.
“What is the DOJ up to here?” Sharpton asked.
“Well, the Department of Justice has been engaged in an effort to basically protect pedophiles, to protect the president, and to protect those predators that the Epstein survivors have said we want to expose,” Fernandez answered.
She continued:
The reason the Epstein survivors have been engaged in this action for decades is because they know that there were those who were criminally liable, civilly liable, who were so cruel that they participated in that. And Epstein told the victims, the young girls and young women, “I have the banks, I have the government, and you have no power.” And what the Department of Justice is showing America is that Epstein and this scandal still has the government.
But what we’re going to show is that that doesn’t work, right? We are going to complain about what they are doing because we do need to have the truth come out.
Sharpton did not point out that the 3.5 million Epstein-related files released in January included an FBI document showing Trump thanked Florida cops and told them to “focus” on “evil” Maxwell back in 2006. Trump recently told reporters the files “absolve” him of any wrongdoing and did not include any emails between him and Epstein.
On Saturday night, Bondi sent a letter to lawmakers saying the DOJ had complied with the Epstein Transparency Act and released all files on the dead sex criminal.
The letter said “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.’”
It also said the Justice Department worked “in consultation with victim counsel and victims directly” on what should be redacted in the files. That included “personally identifiable information of victim or victims’ personal and medical files,” which the letter said “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Watch above via MS NOW.
The post Dem Lawmaker: Trump DOJ Has Aimed to ‘Protect Pedophiles’ With Redacted Names in Epstein Files first appeared on Mediaite.