House members seek inquiry into DoJ’s tracking of their Epstein files research

Members of Congress are calling for investigations after discovering the Department of Justice created records of their research activities while they dig into files connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

Photographs taken by Reuters during a congressional hearing on Wednesday showed the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, holding a document titled “Jayapal Pramila Search History”, listing files that the Democratic US representative Pramila Jayapal had accessed during her review of the Epstein materials.

Access to the unredacted Epstein materials became available to legislators earlier this week under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Several members of Congress are demanding that the justice department halt the tracking, alleging that the department has violated the separation of powers.

“It is an outrage that [the justice department] is tracking members’ investigative steps,” said Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee, who announced he would ask the justice department inspector general to open an inquiry into what he called “this outrageous abuse of power”.

Raskin described a review process he said was designed for surveillance from the start. Members of Congress seeking to examine the files must travel to a justice department annex, sit at one of four department-owned computers, navigate what he called “a clunky and convoluted software system”, and read documents while justice department staffers watch over their shoulders.

“It is the perfect set-up for [the justice department] to spy on members’ review, monitoring, recording and logging every document we choose to pull up,” Raskin said in a statement. “Today, photographs of Attorney General Bondi’s ‘burn book’ confirmed my suspicions.”

The document Bondi brought to the hearing appeared designed to help her anticipate questions from Jayapal based on which files the congresswoman had reviewed – a practice Raskin characterized as the attorney general using the information “for her embarrassing polemical purposes”.

In a letter to lawmakers obtained by NBC News, the justice department said it “will keep a log of the dates and times of all members’ reviews”. But the scope of that tracking – including specific search queries and documents accessed – only became apparent when Bondi appeared at Wednesday’s oversight hearing.

“Bondi showed up today with a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails I searched,” Jayapal wrote on X. “That is outrageous and I intend to pursue this and stop this spying on members.”

Jayapal called the practice “totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the [justice department] to surveil us as we search the Epstein files”.

Representative Suhas Subramanyam, from Virginia, wrote on social media: “As I said yesterday, the [justice department] was keeping a history of all the files we were viewing. Now we know why.”

The Department of Justice did not immediately return a request for comment.

Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican and one of the party’s most vocal critics regarding the Epstein files, said it was “creepy” and described the review process in detail.

“There is someone or two people from the [justice department] monitoring you as you sit on those computers,” Mace told NPR. “There is a tech person who logs you into the computer. They log you into the computer because they’re giving you your own identification. They are tracking all of the documents that members of Congress open, and they’re tracking everything that you do in that room.”

Jayapal told reporters she had discussed the matter with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, adding: “I do think that there is bipartisan agreement that we should be able to review those files without the Department of Justice surveilling us.”

When asked by reporters about the tracking, Johnson called such practices “inappropriate” if they occurred, though he declined to directly criticize the justice department, saying he had not personally seen reports of the surveillance and did not want to comment on “an allegation that is unsubstantiated”.

Raskin, for his part, cited multiple failures: concealing records in violation of law, zero indictments of Epstein associates and now monitoring members conducting oversight.

“Let us use this humiliating disclosure about the attorney general’s work ethics to do a complete reset on the Epstein cover-up,” he said.