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Lawmakers say millions of records remain withheld or heavily redacted, prompting a second transparency bill designed to give the original legislation some actual teeth.
Congress is heading toward another showdown over the Jeffrey Epstein files, with a second transparency bill approaching enough support to force a House vote — although lawmakers will not take it up until after November’s midterm elections.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna are behind the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, arguing the Justice Department has failed to comply fully with last year’s disclosure law. Massie says more than three million files remain withheld and others have been excessively redacted. The sequel legislation would allow Epstein victims and state attorneys general to sue over alleged noncompliance and create additional consequences for officials who improperly withhold information.
Massie’s discharge petition currently has 216 signatures, two short of the 218 required to bypass House leadership and force action. Khanna and Massie say two absent Democrats will supply the remaining signatures when lawmakers return after the election, after which Speaker Mike Johnson would have to deal with the legislation under House discharge procedures.
The pressure is also coming from the courts. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan warned Attorney General Todd Blanche last week that contempt could eventually become an issue if the Justice Department fails to comply with disclosure orders, although the judge said such a finding would currently be premature. What began as a fight to release the files has therefore become something larger: a fight over whether the government actually released what Congress told it to release.
Hot Take: Epstein Files II sounds like the sequel nobody wanted but everybody knew was coming. The extraordinary part is that Congress passed a transparency law — and apparently now needs another transparency law to make the first transparency law work.
The singer’s public defender has secured permission to bring a laptop into jail as the defense begins digging through digital and video evidence.
D4vd’s newly appointed public defender is preparing for an in-person jailhouse evidence session with the singer as his defense against the alleged murder of girlfriend Celeste Rivas takes shape.
According to court documents reported by TMZ, the attorney asked a judge for permission to meet D4vd privately inside the Los Angeles jail and bring a laptop so the pair can review evidence together. The lawyer specifically cited social-media material and potentially video evidence among the material that must be examined to provide an effective defense. The judge approved the request.
The meeting follows the withdrawal of D4vd’s previous high-powered legal team, including Blair Berk, Marilyn Bednarski and Regina Peter, reportedly because he could no longer afford them. Whatever happens next, the celebrity-lawyer phase is over. Now comes the considerably less glamorous business of sitting in a jail room and going through the prosecution’s evidence piece by piece.
Hot Take: The lawyers may have changed, but the evidence hasn’t. Social media, video and whatever else prosecutors have assembled are about to get the laptop-and-jailhouse-table treatment.
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The Aerosmith singer’s civil trial was just two weeks away when the presiding judge withdrew, leaving the case without a new public trial date.
Steven Tyler’s long-awaited sexual assault civil trial has been delayed yet again after Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patricia A. Young abruptly recused herself just two weeks before jury selection was expected to begin.
Julia Misley alleges Tyler groomed and sexually assaulted her after meeting her when she was 16 and he was 25 in the 1970s. Tyler denies the allegations. Several portions of Misley’s case involving alleged encounters outside California have already been dismissed, but a California claim survived. Young disclosed the reason for her disqualification privately to attorneys, but it was not included in the public order, and not every party agreed to waive the issue.
The September 28 trial date has now been vacated, with no replacement publicly announced. Misley has separately asked for the litigation to receive “complex” case status, potentially bringing additional judicial management and another revised schedule. A case already more than half a century removed from the alleged events has therefore acquired another delay measured not in days, but an unknown number of months.
Hot Take: Fifty years after the alleged relationship and nearly four years after the lawsuit was filed, the courtroom reckoning has been postponed again. At this rate, the calendar deserves its own attorney.
His lawyers want independent access to evidence they say could challenge parts of the prosecution’s case when Murdaugh returns to trial next April.
Alex Murdaugh’s defense is digging back into the forensic foundations of the Moselle murders, asking a judge to compel prosecutors to hand over DNA material, ballistics records and raw 3D crime-scene data before his 2027 retrial.
Among the most intriguing requests is biological material associated with Maggie Murdaugh, including DNA evidence the defense says contained a trace male profile unrelated to the family. Lawyers also want records concerning crimes involving .300 Blackout ammunition, seeking to challenge the original prosecution’s portrayal of the weapon used to kill Maggie, and the raw FARO laser-scan files documenting the crime scene rather than merely extracted data previously provided.
Murdaugh’s 2023 convictions for murdering wife Maggie and son Paul were overturned after the South Carolina Supreme Court found improper jury communications involving former Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill. His retrial is scheduled for April in Sumter County, meaning both sides are effectively preparing to fight Moselle from the beginning.
Hot Take: Murdaugh got the second trial his lawyers spent years demanding. Now they’re going after every DNA profile, bullet and digital inch of Moselle. Trial two clearly isn’t going to be a rerun.
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Investigators probing seven missing women are examining the late pornographer’s disturbing history of photographing and filming human remains inside a notorious Philadelphia crematorium.
The investigation surrounding Raymond “R.C.” Horsch has taken another extraordinary turn: police are examining his past access to a Kensington crematorium connected to the Garzone Funeral Home, whose operators were convicted in an illegal body-parts scheme. Sources told The Philadelphia Inquirer that Horsch supplied an employee with drugs and cash in exchange for access to photograph and film human remains.
Horsch even displayed what appeared to be photographs of an unidentified autopsied woman and footage of a body entering an incinerator at a 2014 art exhibition. The crematorium had closed years before the women now under investigation disappeared, so there is currently no evidence establishing that Horsch disposed of any of them there. But the connection has obvious significance as investigators examine five urns recovered from his Olney property, two containing remains still being identified, alongside chemicals, a 55-gallon drum connected to a drain and more than a million digital files.
Police are investigating the disappearances of at least seven women connected in various ways to Horsch or material recovered from his home. Investigators say some footage appears to show women dead or being violently attacked, although Horsch also produced staged violent pornography and frequently blurred fiction and reality. Only around 30 percent of the enormous digital archive has reportedly been reviewed.
Hot Take: The timeline means the crematorium is not a magic answer to the missing women. But Horsch having real-world access to human remains and an incinerator makes an already grotesque investigation considerably darker — and investigators still have roughly 70 percent of his digital archive left to examine.
