The Epstein Commission
What an effective commission would look like, who it pursues, and the question to put to your representative now.
No public official has been convicted for the crimes against Epstein’s victims, the deals and payments that protected him and his associates, or the ongoing coverup. The only American ever convicted in the entire case is Ghislaine Maxwell. The prosecutors who signed the deals, the deputies he paid, the supervisors who approved his work release, and the officials deciding right now which pages the public sees all kept their careers. We are watching a coverup succeed, for now.
The evidence to change that is already in government files: the court rulings, the inspector general report, the grand jury transcripts, the released emails. All that’s missing is a body with the power to use that evidence and the willingness to prosecute. This article describes that body, a commission of inquiry, built on the clearest precedent we have for holding officials criminally responsible for what they did in office: the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the court the Allies built after World War II to try Nazi officials.
The commission’s mandate would cover every official, at any level of government, whose conduct falls into four categories: committing crimes against Epstein’s victims; protecting Epstein and the people around him from prosecution; accepting money or anything else of value from Epstein in connection with their official duties; hiding any of this conduct afterward. The span runs from the first Palm Beach police report in 2005 to the present, and every claim that follows comes with its receipt linked in the text.
In a Manhattan courtroom in 2011, with Epstein due to be entered on the state sex-offender registry, a prosecutor from the district attorney’s office asked the judge for the lowest of the three risk levels, the one that keeps an offender off the public registry, while the office’s own confidential assessment called him highly dangerous. Justice Ruth Pickholz refused, telling the prosecutor she had never seen the office do anything like it. The defense argued for the predator because that was its job; the prosecutor argued for him too, and in that courtroom the only person doing the public’s work was the judge. In other rooms the judge was part of the problem. That scene repeated for twenty years, and the crimes, the deals, the payments, and the concealment took hundreds, maybe thousands, of public employees, almost none of whom ever answered for any of it under oath.
The Nuremberg tribunal judged its defendants on the evidence alone, regardless of rank. I’m not saying everyone in this record goes to prison; I’m saying they get handled that same way. The tribunal acquitted three of its defendants, which proved it weighed evidence rather than delivering verdicts decided in advance. Then it prosecuted lower-ranking figures in twelve more trials and 183 more defendants, and in the one most relevant here the defendants were judges and prosecutors, convicted because they committed their crimes through legal procedure itself. The U.S. has prosecuted the misuse of legal process many times, such as the seventeen Chicago judges convicted for fixing cases to the corruption trials that too infrequently recur in courthouses across the country.
Every person gets judged against the documented record, in public and under oath, and neither rank nor “a subordinate handled it” changes the outcome. For any given name that outcome is one of four: indictment and a criminal trial, disbarment, a permanent public finding of what they did, or, where the evidence clears them, a public finding that they did nothing wrong, printed just as plainly.
Now the design, and the standard is the opposite of the polite version this country already tried. The 9/11 Commission issued three subpoenas in its entire run, let the President and Vice President testify together, in private, unsworn and unrecorded, required unanimity that weakened its findings, and then disbanded. This commission inverts each of those choices. Its subpoenas carry criminal contempt, and its statute strips executive privilege over the covered records before the first hearing convenes. Every witness testifies under oath, on camera, in public; we know why that matters, because Pam Bondi used a private transcribed interview to name her deputy more than thirty times while ducking questions about the President.
The first public act is releasing every file, with only the victims’ identities redacted. And the commission does not merely recommend; its special counsel holds grand jury authority and indicts on the commission’s own evidence, and where the conduct breaks state law, the case goes to the state attorneys general automatically.
What about the people who already got pardoned? Refer them to the states. A presidential pardon does not touch a state charge, it covers only federal crimes, and accepting one is itself an admission of guilt. So the states prosecute pardoned officials under their own criminal codes, and New York rewrote its law in 2019 to make sure they can. The same answer covers the rest. Double jeopardy only protects people who were already tried, and almost nobody here ever was. A pardon cannot cover future conduct, so lying to the commission or destroying records is a fresh crime. A president can pardon a federal case or stall it, but he has no such power over a state charge, and the one Epstein-case conviction that held across the last four years was the state conviction in New York.
Delay is the danger this design takes most seriously, because we just lived through it. Four federal criminal cases were slowed past an election, the defendant won, and the prosecutors and investigators who had pursued him then became the targets. That cannot happen here. The enabling law sends every subpoena fight and privilege claim straight to a three-judge court with direct appeal to the Supreme Court, so the delays that ran out the clock last time end in months. And because the cases also live in the states, no federal election and no federal pardon can shut them down.
Ten members serve, none of them sitting politicians: former judges, prosecutors, career investigators, and survivors’ representatives the victims choose. Findings publish by majority with dissents alongside, and funding arrives up front for the full eighteen months so no future Congress can withhold funding for political purposes.
Running this inquiry raises an obvious problem: the Justice Department and the FBI cannot do it, because they are implicated in the very coverup it would investigate, from the leaders who made the decisions down to the staff who carried them out, and no agency can be trusted to investigate itself. So the commission hires its own investigators, drawn from state agencies and inspector general offices, and its special counsel answers to the commission alone.
The Epstein record under investigation by the counsel would span four eras, and rather than catalog all of them we will cover the first one in full, because it shows the kind of conduct the commission exists to address; the rest follow the same pattern.
Florida, 2005 through 2009. Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer resisted his own police department’s push to charge Epstein with multiple felonies, then convened a 2006 grand jury that heard from a single underage victim out of nearly two dozen the police had identified, and his assistant attacked that girl with her own MySpace pages supplied by Epstein’s defense. The grand jury returned one count. The case then went to U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, who met with an Epstein lawyer who was a partner at his old firm and turned a draft 53-page indictment into a secret non-prosecution deal that immunized Epstein and unnamed co-conspirators, an agreement a judge later ruled was hidden from the victims in violation of the law. And during the thirteen-month sentence that followed, the sheriff’s office let Epstein out twelve hours a day, six days a week against its own policy, while his foundation paid that office $128,136. One man’s crimes, and at every turn a different public official chose to help. The commission would pull every communication, every name behind the co-conspirator clause, every signature on the work release file.
The other three eras followed the same general trends. The 2011 hearing above was one. In 2019 Epstein died in a federal jail where guards falsified the logs, and only the two lowest-ranking officers ever faced charges, which were later dropped. The conduct under review does not end with his death, because the current handling of the files is the fourth era, and it’s ongoing.
On February 21, 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi went on Fox News and said of the long-rumored list of Epstein’s clients, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” By July 7 her department had reversed her, issuing a memo that no such list existed and no further disclosure was warranted. Then Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act and required disclosure, and the Department released about 3.5 million pages of the roughly 6 million it had collected and withheld the rest, citing duplicates and victim protection.
Meanwhile Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche questioned Ghislaine Maxwell under oath, and she was moved soon after to a minimum-security camp in Texas; she has since taken the Fifth before Congress while her attorney says she wants a pardon or a reduced sentence from the President in exchange for her testimony.
Bondi, fired in April, told the Oversight Committee that Blanche ran the entire release; current and former Justice Department officials dispute that account and say she signed off on every major decision, including the July memo itself. Blanche now serves as acting Attorney General. FBI Director Kash Patel told the Senate that inmate transfers were the Bureau of Prisons’ decision, not his, and told the House the Bureau had released everything lawfully permitted, though his own agents had logged thousands of overtime hours in March 2025 preparing a fuller release that was then halted by Bondi and the President.
Survivors are demanding that Blanche and Patel finally testify under oath, on camera. Bondi, Blanche, and Patel each blame the others for how the release was handled, and none has answered for it in sworn public testimony: Bondi gave a closed-door interview that was not under oath, and Blanche and Patel have given no account at all. The commission would start there, putting all three under oath, where lying is a fresh felony and their answers become evidence for the inevitable charges that follow.
The Epstein Commission’s deliverables, aimed to be accomplished inside an eighteen month window:
a report written for the general public
indictments where the special counsel discovers sufficient cause
mandatory referral packages to the state attorneys general, with the evidence attached
bar complaints against every licensed attorney the findings name
recommendations for changes to the laws that failed to prevent this disgusting multi-decade miscarriage of justice
The changes start with a loophole the full federal appeals court in Atlanta confirmed in 2021: the Crime Victims’ Rights Act never applied to Epstein’s victims, the court held, because federal charges were never filed. Under the law as it stands today, a prosecutor can still negotiate a secret immunity deal before indictment and owe the victims nothing. We close that loophole by statute, and no future Acosta gets to use it.
Justice Pickholz did her job alone in that courtroom fifteen years ago, with the state’s own lawyer on Epstein’s side of the argument and the state’s confidential assessment sitting unread in a file. The Epstein Commission can ensure that no judge, no detective, no police chief, and no fourteen-year-old girl ever has to stand alone against the government’s own employees again. Further, the Epstein Commission would aim to ensure that in the future, any FBI Director, DOJ Attorney, President, or Supreme Court Justice that participates or protects those involved in these crimes against humanity, will be prosecuted swiftly and without sympathy or leniency for their role.
The commission is what creates consequences for the people who think they’re above the law. That justice takes the form of indictments, trials, and prison sentences for the people who protected and participated.
Every member of Congress can be asked the same question, yes or no: will you publicly endorse and vote for a commission with these powers? And any one of them can introduce the bill tomorrow, because a discharge petition of 218 signatures forces a floor vote past the leadership that would rather bury it.
Find your representative at house.gov, your senators at senate.gov, and your state legislators at openstates.org. Then send something like this, in your own words:
“I’m [your name], a constituent in [your city]. I care about this because [your reason]. I’m asking you to publicly commit to supporting the creation of an independent Epstein commission with subpoena power, its own special counsel, and mandatory criminal referrals to appropriate state prosecutors. Will you publicly endorse this?”
Remember: Staff count constituent contacts, and a name with a personal story attached is more influential than any form letter.
A quick note: For the last 7 days in a row we have fallen short of the 10 new activist subscribers we need to hit for every article. Millions of folks read these articles, download the free books and booklets, share the model legislation, and the majority of funding for it all comes from the 10 subscribers per article. Don’t let this be the reason you miss a meal or are late on rent, but if you can subscribe, then you’re the reason this all continues for everyone else. Thanks for being here and for caring enough to make the world a better place than you found it. — Chris
TheExistentialistRepublic.com for physical products. You can find free versions of all our books, booklets, and guides in the shop at buymeacoffee.com/TheER.
There's a split among democrats about whether, when we regain power, to seek accountability among republican enablers, or let it go and focus on rebuilding everything that's been broken. I'm glad you're on the accountability side; as I see it, our failure to hold Trump accountable (like Garland's 3 year delay) is the main reason we're in this mess.
That little prick Alex Acosta must be dealt with too....lying to Congress & protecting a felonious child trafficker.