Schumer moves to force Senate to take legal action against DOJ, Trump admin over Epstein doc dump

Schumer on Monday announced that he would file a resolution that would compel the Senate to take legal action against the Trump administration for "illegally refusing to release the complete Epstein files and heavily redacting the files that are released." 

"The law Congress passed is crystal clear: release the Epstein files in full, so Americans can see the truth," Schumer said in a statement. "Instead, the Trump Department of Justice dumped redactions and withheld the evidence - that breaks the law. Today, I am introducing a resolution to force the Senate to take legal action and compel this administration to comply."

Schumer, who forced a successful vote in the Senate on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, previously argued that the "heavily redacted documents released by the Department of Justice today is just a fraction of the whole body of evidence."

"Simply releasing a mountain of blacked-out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law," Schumer said in a statement. "For example, all 119 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why."

There were narrow exceptions to what the government could opt against releasing, including materials that reveal victims' identities or medical files, child sex abuse materials, information that could jeopardize active investigations, images of graphic death or injury, or classified national security information.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that day that the agency would be taking a phased approach and said he expected "that we're going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks," as the DOJ worked to comb through every document to ensure "every victim, their name, their identity, their story, to the extent it needs to be protected, is completely protected."

But it was the inclusion of several heavily redacted documents without explanation as to why they were blacked out that raised lawmakers' eyebrows.

He accused the Trump administration of breaking the law with how it handled the document dump and vowed that the Judiciary Committee would investigate.