You Can’t Make Me

How the DOJ is using the law to keep the Epstein Files buried, and why it’s working

It’s news like this that makes me appreciate the opportunity to vent by written word because if you all heard the expletives spewing from my mouth… There are many ways for a government to tell the public it refuses to comply with the law. You can stonewall quietly, slow-walk documents until everyone forgets why they mattered, and bury things under “ongoing review” until the phrase loses all meaning. You can promise transparency while endlessly “working through the process.” Or, if you’re feeling especially bold, you can march into federal court late on a Friday night and announce, in writing, that no judge on earth has the power to make you do anything at all.

This approach, it should be noted, works extremely well. So well, in fact, that no one is asking for Donald Trump’s tax returns anymore. Remember those? The required disclosures, the solemn assurances that as soon as a routine audit is completed, the public will see them. Records eventually dribbled out so late, so incomplete, and so stripped of consequence that the scandal simply dissolved into background noise. Not resolved, simply exhausted. That, more or less, is where the Trump Department of Justice has now landed in the Epstein files fight.

Let’s be precise, because precision matters here. The DOJ is not literally declaring itself above the law in the cartoonish, mustache-twirling sense. No one filed a motion that says, “We are kings now, deal with it.” What they are doing instead is far more insidious and far more effective: they are arguing that the law Congress passed to force transparency around Jeffrey Epstein is, functionally, unenforceable. A law that exists only as a suggestion. A statute that politely asks the executive branch to do the right thing and then averts its eyes while the executive lights it on fire.

Congress passed the Epstein Transparency Act overwhelmingly. The Senate approved it unanimously. The House passed it with one lonely dissent. Donald Trump signed it. Republicans talked about releasing the Epstein files for years, the way people talk about spring cleaning, always imminent, never actually happening. Victims were promised accountability, and the public was promised the truth. Now, when it came time to comply, the DOJ didn’t just say no. It said you can’t make me.

The argument DOJ has now put on the record is brutally simple. Congress, they say, failed to include a “private cause of action” in the Epstein Transparency Act. In normal English, that means Congress didn’t explicitly say who gets to sue if the law isn’t followed. And because courts are not allowed to invent enforcement mechanisms that Congress didn’t spell out line by line, no judge has the authority to compel compliance. No judge can appoint an independent monitor, order further disclosures, or even meaningfully review whether DOJ is acting in good faith.

Congress passed the law, the DOJ admits. Congress meant what it said, the DOJ quietly implies. But Congress didn’t say the magic words. And without the magic words, the statute is a dead letter.

It’s a remarkable position: Congress can mandate transparency, the president can sign it, and the executive branch can then shrug and say, “Cute law. Anyway.”

What makes this even more grotesque is the context. This isn’t a parking ticket database, this is Jeffrey Epstein: a convicted sex trafficker with deep ties to elites in politics, finance, royalty, and intelligence-adjacent circles; a man who received a sweetheart non-prosecution deal from federal prosecutors; a man who died in federal custody under circumstances so suspicious they’ve become a cultural punchline; a case defined not by transparency, but by silence, redactions, sealed names, and institutional failure.

The same institutions that failed to protect the victims are telling those victims, and the public, that secrecy is necessary to protect them.

The DOJ insists that everything still withheld is being withheld in the name of victim privacy, law enforcement privilege, and executive authority. Courts, they say, simply don’t have the power to second-guess those determinations. Your hands are tied, judge. Don’t blame us, blame the statute.

This position didn’t emerge by accident. Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, in a rare moment of bipartisan clarity, forced it into the open. When DOJ missed the deadlines in the Transparency Act, first the release deadline, then the required report to Congress explaining redactions, Khanna and Massie went back to the federal court that handled the Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases. They filed a friend of the court amicus brief.

Their message to the judge was blunt: the DOJ cannot be trusted to police itself here. The DOJ retraumatized victims, and is now, functionally, on the same side of the table as Ghislaine Maxwell. If this process has any legitimacy left, it needs an independent monitor.

The DOJ’s response was not subtle. No standing, no cause of action, or authority. And absolutely no monitor.

What’s particularly telling is who signed that filing. Not a single career prosecutor. No assistant U.S. attorneys. No rank-and-file lawyers from the Southern District of New York. Just the top brass: Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Jay Clayton. This is not some routine procedural skirmish delegated to staff. This is a political and institutional line in the sand, personally owned by leadership.

And then there’s the farce of the “review process.” Depending on the day, DOJ claims it has 200 lawyers reviewing the files. Or 500. Or 1,000. Sometimes they say they’re working around the clock. Sometimes they say court orders are slowing them down. Other times they say courts have no role at all. Pick your adventure.

Anyone who has actually litigated large document productions knows this is nonsense. Massive corporate cases routinely involve tens of millions of documents, far more than anything Epstein-related, and they get processed in weeks, not years, by teams far smaller than the mythical armies DOJ keeps invoking. The bottleneck isn’t redactions; it’s approval.

And the optics, dear god, the optics. Even if every legal argument DOJ is making were technically correct (a big “if”), the visual is catastrophic. A government that promised transparency is now hiding behind legal doctrine to keep the vault closed. A justice system that once cut Epstein a deal is now insisting it alone gets to decide how much truth the public is allowed to see. The Epstein Transparency Act, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, is being treated as an optional guideline.

People are angry because they understand the pattern. Institutions that fail, protect themselves. Institutions that fail, close ranks and invoke procedure.

This is likely headed to the Supreme Court, it almost has to be. The question is whether Congress can compel transparency at all when the executive branch would rather not comply. It’s whether laws without hyper-specific enforcement clauses are functionally meaningless. It’s whether “no court can” becomes the new normal.

It’s sunny today on the Southern Oregon Coast and Marz and I are headed out for some badly needed fresh air.