Epstein Act Part II
They'll tell you releasing the files is a national security risk. You know what's actually a national security risk? A foreign government having dirt on our leaders— while the American public is left in the dark.
In November 2025, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by a vote of 427 to 1. The Department of Justice reportedly missed the deadline, blacked out names the law appeared to forbid them to redact, asserted privileges critics argued the statute didn't grant, and faced no consequence whatsoever. The most overwhelming bipartisan vote on a disclosure bill in modern memory turned out, in the view of many observers, to be more suggestion than mandate.
The MAD Act, formally Title VII of the Epstein Accountability and Public Disclosure Provisions, is what happens when a bill is drafted on the assumption that the executive branch cannot be trusted to comply a second time. It does not ask for cooperation. It strips the executive branch out of the process and rebuilds it around three goals: getting the Epstein files released, opening a serious public inquiry into how Jeffrey Epstein died, and making sure Ghislaine Maxwell is actually still in the cell where she's supposed to be.
A note before going further. Some of what this bill does will sound unusual. Routine identity checks on a federal inmate. Independent experts examining custody records. Federal agents asked to explain on the public record what specific words in their own files mean. These are not the kinds of provisions normal disclosure laws contain. They are in this bill because the documented record of how the federal government has handled the Epstein matter has produced a level of public distrust that ordinary oversight has struggled to resolve. The provisions that look paranoid on first reading are responses to specific institutional failures that are themselves a matter of public record. Government accountability sometimes requires asking questions that polite people consider impolite. This bill asks them.
Here is what's in it.
The disclosure machine
The heart of the bill is a new office housed inside the National Archives, not the Department of Justice. It is staffed by career archivists, led by an appointee of the Chief Justice rather than the President, and funded directly by Congress in a way the executive branch cannot quietly cut off. Its work cannot be overruled or slow-walked by any executive official without triggering obstruction charges.
The office's job is simple in concept and unprecedented in scope: every federal agency that holds records about the Epstein Network has to turn them over, on a rolling schedule. Not just the FBI and the Justice Department. The bill names more than two dozen agencies, including the CIA, the NSA, the State Department, the Treasury, and the Secret Service. If an agency claims to have nothing, it has to swear to that under penalty of perjury.
The office can withhold material only for a few narrow reasons spelled out in the law, things like protecting an active confidential informant in an unrelated case. It cannot invent new reasons. Embarrassment, political sensitivity, and reputational damage are explicitly written out of the law as grounds for keeping anything secret.
Records appear on a public government website, each one stamped with a digital fingerprint so anyone can verify it hasn't been quietly altered after publication. This addresses a concern raised about the previous disclosure attempt: questions about whether documents were modified or removed without anyone being able to prove it.
The deadline that has teeth
The bill sets a hard ceiling: every covered record must be public by October 15, 2028, four weeks before the next presidential election. That date cannot be extended by executive action. Only an Act of Congress can move it.
The bill anticipates the obvious dodge, in which agencies submit everything on the last day to overwhelm review, by requiring rolling submissions throughout the period. Agencies that miss those interim deadlines lose every protection the bill otherwise offers them. Their records get released anyway, with only victim information redacted. Late submission carries its own punishment built right into the statute.
The President retains two narrow grounds for postponing any specific record: protecting an active informant in an unrelated case, or preventing immediate physical danger to a named person. Each use requires a personal signature on a public certification. Embarrassment is not a reason. National security in the abstract is not a reason. After September 1, 2028, no presidential action of any kind can keep a record out of the public eye.
A backup plan if courts intervene
The bill's drafters knew they were doing something legally aggressive. Forcing the executive branch to disclose classified material runs into longstanding constitutional questions about who controls classification. So the bill includes a fallback that activates only if a court strikes down the main disclosure mechanism.
Under that fallback, the President is not compelled to declassify anything, but every decision to keep a record secret has to be made personally, in writing, in public, with the President's signature attached. Congress still gets the full classified records for oversight. The bill would still get most of what it wants, just through political pressure and congressional access rather than direct compulsion.
Whistleblowers, protected
If you work for the federal government and you have Epstein-related records, the MAD Act gives you something nobody had before: automatic legal protection from Espionage Act prosecution the moment you disclose those records in good faith. No prior authorization. No review board. The protection attaches at the instant of disclosure.
The logic is one of the bill's most clear-headed moves. If a foreign intelligence service already knows what American officials did, and the only people kept in the dark are the American public, then secrecy isn't protecting national security. It's arguably protecting leverage that foreign adversaries may hold over the United States. Disclosure to the American people would, on this view, take that weapon away.
Whistleblowers cannot be fired, demoted, or stripped of their security clearance for coming forward. If their agency retaliates anyway, the burden falls on the agency to prove the punishment would have happened regardless.
The FBI explains its own files
This is the section that will sound strangest at first reading. The bill requires the FBI Director, within thirty days of enactment, to publish a report addressing every plausible explanation for the appearance of certain specific terms in the already-released Epstein files. The terms include "pizza," "hot dog," "cheese pizza," "pasta," and several others.
These terms have been the subject of considerable speculation in public discourse, where some commentators have alleged they function as coded language used by individuals who exploit minors. The FBI has never publicly confirmed or denied any such interpretation in the Epstein context, nor has it explained what its investigators understood the terms to mean when they encountered them in the files.
The bill requires the Bureau to do that work in public. For each term, the report must show where it appears, the surrounding context, and every plausible explanation, from innocent food references to internal Bureau slang to alleged criminal usage. It must also say whether any investigation was opened, extended, or dropped based on those terms.
This sounds conspiratorial. It need not be. At its core, it is an exercise of public oversight: an investigative agency being asked to explain, on the record, what it understood specific words in its own files to mean. The reason this needs to be in legislation is that the question has been raised informally for years and has not received a public answer.
The death of Jeffrey Epstein
The bill requires Congress to hold at least two public, televised hearings within ninety days of enactment, examining the death of Jeffrey Epstein on August 10, 2019. The hearings cover the autopsy, the broader question of whether the official finding of suicide is consistent with the available evidence, and whether Epstein actually is deceased. This may sound conspiratorial, but given members of the public with professional credentials (self-reported) have identified inconsistencies in the evidence of his death/corpse with what is to be expected, it is fair to simply unpack this in public and inquire into the truth officially, since many members of the public are not satisfied with government accounts from the executive branch and alternative theories are circulating. The bill explicitly states that it does not predetermine the answer, again, this is simply a demand for a sincere inquiry into truth. Given the level of ongoing public interest in this topic generally, this bill maintains this is a fair request for information.
It is worth noting that the FBI's determination, which holds that Epstein died by suicide and that no criminality was involved, remains the official federal finding, and the DOJ Inspector General's 2023 report stated that it did not uncover evidence contradicting that determination. The bill requires that the questions surrounding the institutional failures be examined in public, on the record, with testimony from independent forensic experts who do not work for the federal government. Those experts receive personal security protection from the U.S. Marshals Service.
The Attorney General has thirty days to turn over every federal record relating to Epstein's incarceration, monitoring, and death directly to the relevant congressional committees, with privilege claims itemized rather than asserted in bulk.
Maxwell, in person
Ghislaine Maxwell already appeared before the House Oversight Committee in February 2026, virtually, on a video link, where she pleaded the Fifth to every question. The MAD Act requires her to appear again, in person, before a joint Senate and House Judiciary Committee deposition, within sixty days of enactment.
To remove the Fifth Amendment as a defense, the bill grants Maxwell the narrowest form of immunity the Constitution allows for compelling testimony. It applies only to genuinely new information she discloses. It offers no protection to any co-conspirator she might name. It does not reduce her existing twenty-year sentence by a single day.
She can still refuse to answer. The bill doesn't pretend it can force the words out of her mouth. But the legal foundation for her Fifth Amendment claim is removed, the deposition is in person and televised, and the country gets to watch her decide whether to speak.
Making sure Maxwell is still Maxwell
This section will sound, to a reader encountering it cold, like the part where the bill tips into paranoia. The reasons it is in the bill are matters of public record.
Jeffrey Epstein died in federal custody, in a cell with cameras that had reportedly stopped recording, while two guards who were supposed to be watching him fell asleep. His cellmate had been transferred the day before. The DOJ Inspector General's report on his death documented that staff had falsified custody records, that no rounds were conducted in his housing unit for a span of roughly eight hours before his body was discovered, and that nearly all surveillance cameras in that unit had stopped recording weeks earlier. The Inspector General nonetheless stated that it did not uncover evidence contradicting the FBI's determination of suicide. Even so, multiple public polls conducted in 2025 found that roughly half or more of Americans surveyed do not accept the suicide finding. Many who do accept it nonetheless view the institutional failures as a profound breakdown in basic custodial competence. Either way, the federal Bureau of Prisons lost the most important federal witness on Epstein in a manner that has not been satisfactorily explained to the public.
Ghislaine Maxwell is now in the custody of that same executive branch. She is among the very few people alive with comprehensive knowledge of who participated in the Epstein Network and who facilitated it.
There is also the question of who Maxwell's family was. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a British media baron whose alleged ties to Israeli intelligence have been the subject of extensive investigative reporting and named-source accounts over several decades, though no declassified record has ever publicly confirmed a formal agency relationship. Mainstream assessments generally conclude that he very likely cooperated with Israeli intelligence in some informal capacity, while stopping short of calling him a controlled agent. His 1991 death at sea has likewise been the subject of competing theories that have never been fully resolved. None of this proves anything about Ghislaine Maxwell as an intelligence asset, and the bill explicitly does not draw that conclusion. But it does mean that the universe of actors with a potential interest in her continued availability is plausibly larger than the universe of co-conspirators who simply do not want to be named in a deposition. The bill takes the position that, given the documented history, ordinary custodial assurances may not be sufficient.
The bill's identity verification regime also addresses a more specific concern. Every prison transfer is a window, a moment when the person physically in custody passes through multiple hands and multiple chains of paperwork. The previous custodian of the previous most important Epstein witness lost him without producing an explanation the public has fully accepted. Asking whether the person who arrived at a destination facility after a transfer is the same person who left the origin facility is, in the bill's framing, basic due diligence after August 10, 2019.
The MAD Act addresses this by establishing routine, court-supervised identity checks on Maxwell wherever she is held. A small panel of federal judicial officers, including specialists in fingerprint analysis and forensic anthropology, conducts unannounced quarterly visits. At each visit, they take fingerprints, photographs, and physical measurements, compare them against a baseline record kept under seal by the court, and report the result publicly. Any future transfer between facilities triggers immediate notification to Congress and the supervising judge, and the verification process picks up at the destination.
The penalties for tampering with this system are severe: substituting another person for Maxwell, falsifying any verification record, or obstructing the process are all federal felonies with mandatory prison time. If Maxwell dies or is reported incapacitated, no death certificate can be issued and no remains can be released until an independent forensic examiner confirms identity against the baseline.
What it would actually accomplish
If the MAD Act passes and survives, here is what changes:
The Epstein files actually become public. Every responsive record from every federal agency, on a fixed schedule, on the web for anyone to read, no later than four weeks before the next presidential election.
Federal employees who have been sitting on Epstein-related records for years, afraid that coming forward would end their careers or expose them to Espionage Act prosecution, finally have a legal path to tell the public the truth. The protection is automatic, the retaliation rules are real, and the question of whether to speak becomes a matter of conscience rather than a matter of personal ruin.
The FBI explains, on the record and in public, what specific words in its own files mean. These are words that have been the subject of years of speculation and that the Bureau has not publicly addressed in the Epstein context.
Congress holds public, televised hearings on the death of Jeffrey Epstein, with independent forensic experts examining the evidence in front of cameras. The bill does not predetermine the conclusion. It ensures the question gets examined in the open, by people qualified to weigh in, with the facts on the table.
Ghislaine Maxwell appears before Congress in person, with her Fifth Amendment defense legally removed, while the country watches. Whether she speaks is her decision, made in front of everyone, not in a closed room with the federal officials whose institutions failed to keep Epstein alive.
And on a regular schedule, the public gets independent confirmation that the woman serving Maxwell's sentence is, in fact, Ghislaine Maxwell.
These are not the protections a normal disclosure law would contain. They are in this bill because the documented institutional record, in the view of its drafters, makes them necessary. The first Epstein disclosure law passed 427 to 1. The MAD Act is the version of that vote that actually has teeth.
Sources
A note to readers: We are committed to providing the public with accurate, factually grounded information. If you identify any errors of fact, gaps in sourcing, or flaws in the reasoning presented in this article, we would be grateful if you would bring them to our attention so they can be corrected. Mistakes are possible in any work of this kind, and we take corrections seriously.
[1] Epstein Files Transparency Act, Public Law 119-38, enacted November 19, 2025. Vote: 427–1 (House), unanimous consent (Senate). Violations documented in bill findings, Sec. 2(a)–(b); congressional letter to the relevant federal court, January 8, 2026; GAO review letter, March 11, 2026.
[2] Bill text, Sec. 5(b-1), naming specific agencies including FBI (Criminal Investigative Division, Counterintelligence Division, and Albuquerque Field Office), DOJ (Main Justice, SDFL, SDNY, National Security Division, Criminal Division/CEOS, OPR), USMS, Bureau of Prisons, DEA, ATF, CIA, NSA, DIA, ODNI, NGA, NRO, DCSA, CBP, ICE, TSA, FAA, Coast Guard, State Department, Secret Service, IRS, and Treasury/FinCEN.
[3] Bill text, Sec. 5(b-1) and Sec. 6B(h), requiring sworn non-existence affidavits from agencies claiming no responsive records.
[4] Bill text, Sec. 6B, establishing the Federal Unit for Managing Epstein Documents within the National Archives.
[5] Bill text, Sec. 5, establishing rolling publication with SHA-256 hash verification on GovInfo.gov and October 15, 2028 hard publication deadline.
[6] Bill text, Sec. 6, Presidential Postponement Certification — limited to active confidential sources and imminent physical danger; explicitly excludes national security, foreign policy sensitivity, and institutional embarrassment.
[7] House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Chairman Comer press release listing completed interviews (Bill Barr, Alex Acosta, Ghislaine Maxwell, Les Wexner, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Richard Kahn) and requesting testimony from prison guard Tova Noel, March 13, 2026. https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-seeks-transcribed-interview-with-epstein-prison-guard/; NPR, "Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to testify before Congress," February 9, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/09/nx-s1-5704371/jeffrey-epstein-co-conspirator-ghislaine-maxwell-to-testify-before-congress
[8] Bill text, Sec. 15, mandate for at least two public congressional hearings on Epstein's death within 90 days; minimum two independent forensic pathologists with security protections. Bill findings, Sec. 2(c), explicitly stating Congress does not determine whether Epstein is dead or whether his death was suicide or homicide.
[9] NPR, "Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to testify before Congress," February 9, 2026. Closed-door, virtual testimony before House Oversight Committee.
[10] Bill text, Sec. 11 (congressional deposition of Maxwell within 60 days) and Sec. 12 (pre-deposition evidence certification).
[11] Bill text, Sec. 13, use and derivative use immunity.
[12] Bill text, Sec. 14, cross-regional Special Master pool and quarterly biometric verification.
[13] Bill text, Sec. 7, self-executing Espionage Act immunity for Qualified Disclosants.
[14] Bill text, Sec. 7A, whistleblower financial protections and civil remedies.
