Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter on Monday called for the Trump administration to release the “Epstein files.”
Bernice King, the same day the administration released records on the FBI’s surveillance of her father, requested more transparency on an issue that the president has been trying leave behind him: his ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Now, do the Epstein files,” the late civil rights icon’s daughter wrote on X.
ADVERTISEMENT
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
But when asked earlier Monday about the possibility of the bureau doing so, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Attorney General Pam Bondi was ultimately responsible.
“The president has said if the Department of Justice and the FBI want to move forward with releasing any further credible evidence, they should do so,” Leavitt said. “As to why they have or have not or will, you should ask the FBI.”
Earlier this month, the FBI and the Department of Justice initiated a flurry of right-wing anger when they announced that no additional information about Epstein’s ties to socialites like the president would be available to the public.
The issue has been especially thorny for the administration because it was Attorney General Pam Bondi who said in February that an Epstein client list was sitting on her desk.
The president has been framing the issue as a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats. But reporting last week by The Wall Street Journal on an alleged intimate note that Trump wrote to Epstein for his 50th birthday party has only upped the pressure on the administration to act.
The next day, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to unseal pertinent grand jury testimony—but experts have said that that could not amount to much.
In the meantime, Trump has seized on conveniently-timed, wild claims by his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, about a supposed “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration to hamper Trump’s first administration. This has entailed posting an AI video of his predecessor being arrested the Oval Office, and salivating over the imprisonment of other Democrats.
