Federal investigators and prosecutors could have stopped the crimes Jeffrey Epstein went on to commit after 2005, House Oversight Committee Republicans concluded in a 137-page report released Tuesday, Nov. 10.
The majority staff report closes a 15-month investigation with 19 witness interviews and depositions, documents from the Justice Department and Epstein's estate, and a review of financial records, according to Chairman James Comer's announcement.
"The federal government has failed the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's horrific crimes for decades," Comer said.
The 2007 deal and the work release
The report puts much of the blame on the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. In 2007, instead of seeking a federal indictment, the office signed a non-prosecution agreement that let Epstein plead guilty to state charges. He was sentenced in 2008 to 18 months, spent much of that time on work release, and was let out after 13 months with credit for good behavior.
During that work release, the committee says, Epstein kept abusing women. Prosecutors also did not tell victims about the agreement, which the report says hurt their ability to bring civil claims. Some of the office's failures reflected poor judgment, according to the report, while others "appeared to stem from Epstein's pervasive influence and far-reaching connections."
His death and the files
After his 2019 arrest, Epstein died in a federal jail in New York. The report says guards on both shifts that night skipped at least a dozen rounds and three head counts, leaving Epstein and other inmates without adequate supervision for nearly eight hours.
The committee also faults the Justice Department's handling of document releases under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in 2025. It says poor redactions exposed survivors' personal information.
What the report recommends
The committee wants the Justice Department to question key witnesses, some for the first time and some again, investigate sexual assault allegations that a former Epstein assistant raised against two prominent men during her interview with the committee, and give survivors unredacted access to their own records. It also says financial institutions, including American Express, failed to act on red flags for trafficking and immigration fraud, and asks the Treasury Department and its financial crimes unit to review whether banks are meeting their reporting duties.
Comer is pushing his Survivor's Voice Protection Act, H.R. 10389, which would keep nondisclosure agreements from stopping witnesses and survivors of sexual abuse from speaking out.
The majority report also says the facts gathered "do not suggest President Trump is implicated in any of Epstein's crimes," and accuses committee Democrats of trying to implicate him.
The committee's top Democrat, Rep. Robert Garcia, called it "a report based on an incomplete investigation and zero public hearings." He said the Justice Department is still withholding more than 2.5 million pages of documents, and that Democrats plan to hold public hearings that would question powerful men who associated with Epstein, "including Donald Trump."
