🔗 Share this article

Oversight Panel

The House investigative committee has released a collection of approximately 70 photographs secured from the holdings of deceased convicted individual convicted of sex crimes Jeffrey Epstein.

This constitutes the latest in a series of disclosure from a cache of more than 95,000 images the body has secured from Epstein's property. It includes pictures of passages from the literary work Lolita scrawled across a woman's body, and redacted images of women's foreign passports.

This action comes just hours before the December 19th due date for the Department of Justice to make public all files connected to its inquiry into Epstein.

"These latest photos bring up more inquiries about precisely what the DOJ has in its custody," said the ranking member of the committee, Robert Garcia.

What is in the Photographs Released

Some of the photographs released on recently show Epstein in discussion with professor and activist Noam Chomsky on a personal aircraft; Bill Gates positioned alongside a individual whose face is redacted; Steve Bannon positioned at a desk across from Epstein, and previous Alphabet president Sergey Brin at a dinner event.

Oversight Panel

These are the latest affluent, powerful men to be pictured in Epstein property photos released by the committee - earlier published photos also depict US President Donald Trump and past president Bill Clinton, as well as director Woody Allen, former US Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor, and others.

Being pictured in the photographs is not proof of any illegal activity, and a number of the photographed individuals have asserted they were not participating in Epstein's illegal activity.

In a statement accompanying the photo disclosure, Lawmakers on the US House Oversight Committee said the Epstein estate's representatives did not supply background information or timings for the photographs.

"Images were chosen to provide the American people with openness into a illustrative selection of the images obtained from the estate, and to offer perspectives into Epstein's network and his exceptionally troubling behavior," the statement reads.

Oversight Panel

The publication also contains a number of photographs of passages from the Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita written in black ink across various areas of a female's body, such as her chest, foot, hipbone, and spine. Lolita recounts the story of a young girl who was exploited by a older literature professor.

A particular excerpt from the book scrawled across a female's chest states, "Lolita's name: the point of the tongue making a journey of three steps down the roof of the mouth to land, at three, on the teeth".

There are also a series of photographs of female identification and identification documents from countries worldwide, like Lithuania, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

Oversight Panel

Most of the details on the IDs, including names and DOBs, is redacted but the panel said in a press release that the passports pertain to "individuals whom Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators were involved with".

A further photograph features Epstein sitting at a table closely in the company of three female figures whose faces have been obscured - one individual has her hand on Epstein's chest under his shirt, and another is crouching to look at a nearby computer. Epstein appears to be assisting the final person fasten a bracelet.

Committee

An additional image released is a image of text messages from an unidentified person who says they have been sent "several females" and are demanding "$one thousand dollars for each individual".

Photo Disclosure Occurs Prior to DOJ Deadline

The panel has a vast number of images in its holdings from the Epstein estate, which are "simultaneously explicit and ordinary," its press release on this week noted.

The oversight panel first legally compelled the property of Epstein, who was found dead in a New York prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on accusations of sex trafficking, in August.

The images and records the Epstein property gave to the panel are different than what is often referred to "Epstein-related records". Those files are documents under the DOJ's control associated with its own inquiry into Epstein.

Under the recently passed law, which the President made law in November, the DOJ has a deadline of 19 December to release its records. The scope of what is included in the DOJ's documents is unknown, and it's likely that a large amount of the information will be heavily obscured, similar to the committee's materials