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Oversight Panel

The House Oversight Committee has released a batch of around 70 photos secured from the holdings of late convicted individual convicted of sex crimes Jeffrey Epstein.

This represents the third such release from a tranche of over 95,000 photographs the body has acquired from Epstein's property. It includes photographs of quotes from the book Lolita written across a woman's body, and censored pictures of women's foreign passports.

This release occurs just hours before the December 19th cut-off for the Department of Justice to make public every records related to its probe into Epstein.

"These photos pose further questions about what exactly the Justice Department has in its custody," stated the ranking member of the committee, Robert Garcia.

Contents in the Photos Disclosed

A number of the photos made public on Thursday show Epstein conversing with scholar and advocate Noam Chomsky inside a private jet; Bill Gates standing next to a female whose features is redacted; Steve Bannon positioned at a workstation across from Epstein, and previous Alphabet president Sergey Brin at a dinner gathering.

Oversight Panel

These are the latest affluent, powerful men to be pictured in Epstein property images released by the oversight panel - formerly released photos also depict US President Donald Trump and past president Bill Clinton, as well as film director Woody Allen, previous US Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor, and other figures.

Being pictured in the photos is is not considered indication of any wrongdoing, and several of the featured individuals have stated they were in no way implicated in Epstein's illegal activity.

In a press release accompanying the photo publication, Democrats on the US House Oversight Committee said the Epstein estate's representatives did not offer background information or dates for the photographs.

"Images were selected to offer the American people with openness into a illustrative selection of the photos received from the holdings, and to provide understanding into Epstein's associates and his extremely troubling behavior," the release states.

Oversight Panel

The publication also includes multiple photographs of excerpts from the Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita written in dark ink across various areas of a woman's body, including her chest, lower extremity, hip, and back. Lolita recounts the story of a young girl who was groomed by a adult literature professor.

An example of a passage from the novel scrawled across a woman's upper body states, "Lolita: the point of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the roof of the mouth to tap, at three, on the teeth".

Additionally, there are a collection of images of women's identification and official papers from nations globally, including Lithuania, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

Committee

The majority of the data on the IDs, including identities and DOBs, is censored but the panel indicated in a press release that the travel documents are associated with "females whom Jeffrey Epstein and his associates were involved with".

An additional photograph depicts Epstein positioned at a workstation in close proximity surrounded by three individuals whose features have been redacted - one has her hand on Epstein's torso under his clothing, and another individual is leaning to examine a adjacent device. Epstein can be seen to be assisting the final person put on a piece of jewelry.

Committee

A further photograph released is a image of digital messages from an unnamed sender who states they have been provided "some girls" and are requesting "$$1,000 per girl".

Photo Publication Occurs Ahead of DOJ Due Date

The committee has many thousands of photos in its possession from the Epstein holdings, which are "simultaneously explicit and everyday," its statement on this week noted.

The oversight panel first subpoenaed the estate of Epstein, who was found dead in a New York jail in 2019 while pending legal proceedings on charges of human trafficking, in August.

The photographs and documents the Epstein property gave to the committee are different than what is largely called "Epstein-related records". That material are documents in the justice department's custody associated with its separate investigation into Epstein.

Under the recently passed law, which the President enacted in November, the DOJ has a deadline of 19 December to publish its documents. The scope of what is contained in the DOJ's documents is unclear, and it's likely that a significant portion of the content will be heavily redacted, similar to House Oversight Committee documents