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Committee

The House Oversight Committee has made public a set of around 70 images obtained from the property of deceased found guilty sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

This constitutes the third release from a larger collection of more than 95,000 images the committee has acquired from Epstein's estate. It contains photographs of quotes from the literary work Lolita scrawled across a woman's body, and redacted pictures of women's foreign passports.

This release arrives just hours before the 19th of December cut-off for the Justice Department to disclose all records connected to its probe into Epstein.

"These photos pose more queries about precisely what the Justice Department has in its holdings," remarked the ranking member of the committee, Robert Garcia.

Contents in the Photographs Released

Several of the images published on Thursday depict Epstein in discussion with scholar and advocate Noam Chomsky aboard a personal aircraft; Bill Gates standing next to a individual whose face is censored; Steve Bannon seated at a table across from Epstein, and ex- Alphabet president Sergey Brin at a evening meal.

Investigative Body

These are the latest wealthy, prominent individuals to be pictured in Epstein estate images released by the House Oversight Committee - previously published photos also depict US President Donald Trump and past president Bill Clinton, as well as movie director Woody Allen, former US Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor, and additional individuals.

Showing up in the photographs is is not considered evidence of any misconduct, and a number of the pictured individuals have asserted they were never involved in Epstein's criminal activity.

In a press release released with the photo publication, Democrats on the US House Oversight Committee stated the Epstein estate did not offer context or timings for the pictures.

"Images were selected to offer the American people with clarity into a typical cross-section of the images obtained from the holdings, and to provide understanding into Epstein's circle and his extremely troubling actions," the statement reads.

Oversight Panel

The disclosure also contains multiple photos of quotes from the Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita penned in dark ink across different parts of a woman's body, like her chest, feet, hipbone, and back. Lolita tells the account of a adolescent who was manipulated by a middle-aged literature professor.

One quote from the novel written across a woman's torso says, "Lolita's name: the point of the tongue making a journey of three steps down the roof of the mouth to alight, at three, on the teeth".

There are also a number of photographs of female identification and ID papers from countries globally, including Lithuania, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

Committee

The majority of the information on the IDs, such as identities and DOBs, is obscured but the panel stated in a press release that the travel documents belong to "individuals whom Jeffrey Epstein and his associates were involved with".

Another photo shows Epstein seated at a table closely flanked by three female figures whose identities have been obscured - a first has her palm on Epstein's torso under his shirt, and a second is bending to view a adjacent laptop. Epstein seems to be helping the third attach a piece of jewelry.

Oversight Panel

A further photograph released is a image of text messages from an unnamed person who says they have been sent "a number of girls" and are demanding "$$1,000 per female".

Photograph Release Arrives Ahead of DOJ Cut-off

The committee has many thousands of images in its possession from the Epstein estate, which are "both disturbing and mundane," its statement on this week explained.

The Congressional committee first legally compelled the estate of Epstein, who was found dead in a New York jail in 2019 while pending legal proceedings on accusations of sex trafficking crimes, in August.

The images and records the Epstein property submitted to the body are separate from what is largely termed "the Epstein files". Those are papers within the DOJ's control connected to its independent probe into Epstein.

Under the Transparency Act, which Donald Trump signed into law in November, the DOJ has a deadline of 19 December to release its documents. The full nature of what is included in the DOJ's files is unknown, and it's probable that a large amount of the material will be heavily redacted, comparable to the committee's materials