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Floor Speech

Date: March 3, 2026
Location: Washington, DC

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Mr. CRAPO. And the investigation there is, ongoing, must focus on bringing those who participated to justice.

The Justice Department already has been tasked and has tasked about 500 lawyers to publicly release over 3 million pages, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos in response to President Trump having signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on November 19, 2025.

According to one New York Times article, the current pile of pages would reach to the top of the Empire State Building.

Since the House of Representatives took the lead on moving the Epstein Files Transparency Act, it is not surprising that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the House Judiciary Committee are now leading the congressional review of the millions of pages of documents from the Justice Department. The House Oversight Committee is particularly busy reviewing documents relating to corporate, nonprofit, academic, and governmental entities with known or alleged ties to Epstein's web of financial networks that were turned over by the U.S. Justice Department on January 31, along with documents turned over earlier by the Epstein estate.

The House Oversight Committee also specifically requested these Treasury documents that have been talked about here today from the Department of Treasury and requested that the Department provide all suspicious activities reports, or SARS, and accompanying material filed relating to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein for its independent review.

That is these very files that the Treasury Department was asked to release and provide. Treasury replied that it would fully cooperate with the committee and that it will work alongside other relevant Federal Agencies to deliver on the request as thoroughly as possible.

The subpoenas, depositions, and SAR requests made between the two House committees are part of a very robust investigatory process, one which deals with massive amounts of information and patterns of activity collected over a 20-year period.

The Finance Committee has one of the broadest committee jurisdictions in the Senate, but it is the Banking Committee, not the Finance Committee, which has specific subject matter jurisdiction over bank suspicious activity reports and a more particular expertise with reading and handling of those documents.

At this stage, while the House committees are pursuing the same exact information from the same Agencies and the Agencies have agreed, by law passed in the House and Senate, to release those materials, it would not be helpful for either the Senate Finance or the Senate Banking Committee to confound the process by attempting to duplicate or compete with their work while adding more stress to the Department struggling to keep up with the pace of congressional demands.

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Mr. CRAPO. Mr. President, just to make one quick clarification, I am not just talking about the Justice Department. The Treasury Department has agreed to release the exact files that have been demanded and has said that they will provide them as thoroughly and as quickly as possible to the House Oversight Committee.

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