Tuesday on MS NOW’s “Deadline,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Congress needed to appoint a special master to take over the release of the Epstein files.
Raskin said, “The statute itself, the one authored by Massie and Khanna does not have enforcement provisions in it. So we’re forced to look at what are the other enforcement vehicles that exist in federal law or in the Constitution. And one of them, of course, would be to refer the uncooperative people to the Department of Justice for prosecution but of course, we’re referring them essentially to themselves, to the Department of Justice. So that seems to have limited utility in this situation. Congress does have the inherent power to confer sanctions of its own. In other words, if the majority that passed this statute were to hang together, we could move forward to say that officials at the Department of Justice are in contempt of Congress and then to offer a whole panoply of civil or criminal sanctions, if it came down to it.”
“But I would say before going to that point, really what we need here is a special master to be appointed, who’s outside of the Department of Justice, who is a neutral magistrate or judge who would get all of the material, who everybody would be able to trust to actually turn over the material with the appropriate redactions to protect the victims and survivors, but also not to be covering up in the interests of various political factors for other people involved,” he continued. “I would think that that’s something that we should try to get a bipartisan majority behind in Congress, the appointment of a special master. Because leaving it up to Pam Bondi and Kash Patel was obviously not working to break out of the political stalemate we’re in.”
He added, “It would be best to have somebody like a neutral magistrate, a special master, put in charge of doing this. And that’s something that, you know, we can raise when we get back into Congress.”
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