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Floor Speech
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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, nobody in our country should ever be above the law, certainly not powerful people who believe that they can perpetrate crimes on victims and get away with it because they have so much wealth and so many lawyers and so many friends in high places.
If you go outside the doors of the Senate Chamber, to my right, and you continue straight ahead and you go out the second set of doors to the steps of the Capitol, you are looking straight across at the Supreme Court. And while scaffolding is up right now, making it hard to see the words, the words that are engraved above those pillars are those words ``Equal Justice Under Law.'' Powerful words. A powerful vision that all Americans are subject to the law.
There is no special get-out-of-jail-free card under that vision for the powerful, but all too often the combination of reams of well-paid lawyers and a whole lot of friends ready to help you, the powerful commit crimes and get away with it.
We should aspire to the vision that is there above the Supreme Court, that vision of ``Equal Justice Under Law,'' that no politician, no celebrity, no megamillionaire or billionaire can buy their way out of justice when they commit crimes and particularly not crimes that involve life-altering damage, crimes in which people are killed, crimes in which people are mutilated, crimes in which people are raped.
No matter how powerful someone is, they need to be prosecuted when they commit these crimes. And the American people have a right to know what information the government is suppressing to protect these individuals. So this brings us to the conversation of the Epstein files. There is only one right answer, complete and total disclosure. That is the only pathway to justice.
We have a lot of suspicions across this country about what is contained in those files hidden in the Department of Justice, those files that are hidden in the Department of the Treasury.
My colleague Senator Wyden, on the Finance Committee, has been working on this for years. I heard an objection from across the aisle, Why are you interested now? Well, Senator Wyden has been leading the search to understand what went on. There is a billion dollars of money that was transferred, thousands of transfers that were ignored by key banks that would have painted a portrait of a criminal empire in motion. And yet, somehow, none of those transfers triggered the attention that they merited.
So here is what we know: We know that Epstein ran a massive network of sex trafficking, sex trafficking of young girls to powerful men. Now, we don't know who they are, in terms of those powerful men, and there may be many names in the files--the Epstein files--that involve people who had nothing to do with those crimes. They may simply be friends in a network; they may be business associates in some other legitimate way; but some of them may well be these powerful men who raped young girls.
So those folks who were not part of that shouldn't be objecting to the release of the files because the files would simply show that they had nothing to do with those crimes against young women. But the folks who were the perpetrators, whose names might be in that file, right now, I can guarantee you, they are working the system of every high friend across this country, every megamillionaire and billionaire who participated in these violent acts on the innocent young, and they are trying to make sure this information never comes out. So far, they have succeeded, and that is wrong.
Several of my colleagues are preparing to speak to this, and Senator Durbin--I am looking to see that he is here, yes, he is--is going to speak to it next. My colleague from across the aisle is here to respond to a request to hear and vote on a bill that will tell the Department of Justice, you must release these files; transparency must happen.
Now, why did I write this bill? I wrote this bill because the Attorney General said we don't have legal permission to release the information. So let's give her the legal permission to release this information. In fact, let's pass a law right now, today, here in the Senate, that says you not only have permission to release the Epstein files, but we are passing a law saying you must release the Epstein files, with the names of the victims redacted to protect them.
So as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged and the Senate proceed to immediate consideration of S. 2557; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, my colleague has come to the floor and said that there is a provision in a bill, but will he yield for a question about that provision?
He will not because he has just left the floor because he doesn't want to answer the question. But I invite him to come back because the provision he is talking about does not require the release of the Epstein files--not at all. And so he has come to the floor, and he said Democrats blocked a provision, and he won't tell you what I am telling you right now, that provision does not require the release of the Epstein files. So it is misrepresenting the situation.
And you saw him change the topic. Why change the topic from this topic? Americans have been very clear that they want these files released. This is the bill that will do it.
And I yield to my colleague from Illinois.
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