type: timeline_event
The House Oversight Committee launched a bipartisan investigation into DOJ's withholding of Trump-related Epstein files on February 25, 2026 — one day after NPR reported that approximately 53 pages of FBI interview records containing sexual abuse accusations against President Trump had been quietly removed from the public Epstein database despite AG Bondi's assurances that all files had been released.
In a significant development, Committee Chair James Comer, a Republican, joined Ranking Member Robert Garcia, a Democrat, in pledging to investigate the Justice Department's handling of the missing files. Comer's involvement was notable: the Oversight Committee had been one of the primary vehicles for Republican-led Epstein investigations, and its Republican chairman joining a Democratic push to probe DOJ's protective handling of Trump-related records represented a rare break in partisan solidarity on the issue.
Garcia's office specified that "the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Donald Trump of heinous crimes" and demanded that AG Bondi provide a full accounting of what had been withheld and why. The investigation sought to determine whether the withholding violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law in November 2025 with a near-unanimous 427-1 House vote and required public disclosure of all investigative Epstein records.
The bipartisan nature of the inquiry created an unusual political dynamic: a Republican-controlled committee investigating a Republican Attorney General for potentially protecting a Republican president from damaging disclosures. Legal analysts noted the potential criminal exposure if DOJ officials had deliberately withheld files in violation of the Transparency Act's mandatory disclosure requirements. Democrats simultaneously demanded that if Republicans were compelling Clinton depositions over Epstein connections, they would seek to compel testimony from Trump as well.