TLDR
Rep. Jamie Raskin sent a letter to Deputy AG Todd Blanche on January 31, 2026, citing $1.5 billion in suspicious bank transactions and 200,000 withheld pages, challenging DOJ's claim of full compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act (Raskin, 2026). He had previously written to four bank CEOs demanding records, and publicly accused AG Bondi of an "Epstein cover-up" at the February 11 hearing.
The Day After "Final"
On January 30, 2026, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche held a press conference declaring the DOJ's Epstein document release complete. He described it as the "fifth and final release," totaling 3.5 million pages. The next day, January 31, Rep. Jamie Raskin sent a letter that contested nearly every element of that claim (Raskin, 2026).
Raskin, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, addressed his letter directly to Blanche. It cited two numbers that reframed the entire compliance debate: $1.5 billion in suspicious bank transactions across four financial institutions, and 200,000 or more pages that DOJ had acknowledged withholding or heavily redacting (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
The $1.5 billion figure did not come from speculation. It came from Raskin's own investigation.
Four Letters to Four Banks
On October 8, 2025 — three weeks before the Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed — Raskin had sent individual letters to the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase (Jamie Dimon), Bank of America (Brian Moynihan), Deutsche Bank, and BNY Mellon (Robin Vince). Each letter probed the institution's handling of Epstein-related accounts and transactions (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
The $1.5 billion figure encompasses suspicious transactions identified across all four banks. This number exceeds even Senator Wyden's Treasury investigation, which documented $1.08 billion in 4,725 wire transfers (Wyden, 2025). The difference suggests Raskin's calculation includes bank-side records — internal transaction data, compliance flags, and account activity — that are not captured in Treasury's wire transfer records.
Neither the Wyden Treasury records nor the Raskin bank records are in the public corpus. Our pipeline extracted 224 wire transfers totaling $24.1 million from Deutsche Bank documents alone. The gap between $24.1 million and $1.5 billion illustrates the scale of what remains unreleased (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
The Hearing
On February 11, 2026, Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was nominally about DOJ oversight, but Democrats turned it into an Epstein accountability session (C-SPAN, 2026).
Raskin's opening statement accused Bondi of an "Epstein cover-up" and a "betrayal of the principle of justice for all." He had formally requested a dedicated Epstein hearing in a July 2025 letter co-signed by Representatives Nadler and Lofgren. Chairman Jordan never scheduled one.
Jordan's position created a peculiar asymmetry: the chairman who had not pressed for Epstein document releases during his opening remarks used his procedural authority to prevent a focused hearing on the topic. Raskin used the general oversight hearing to fill the gap.
Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance
Two days after the Bondi hearing, on February 13, Raskin joined Representatives Jayapal and Garcia in demanding that DOJ cease surveillance of congressional members reviewing files at the DOJ annex. The catalyst was a photograph of AG Bondi holding a printout labeled "Jayapal Pramila Search History" — evidence that DOJ was tracking which documents each member opened and which names they searched (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
The surveillance revelation transformed the oversight dynamic. Members were reviewing files that DOJ was required by law to release. The agency being overseen was monitoring the overseers. Even Speaker Johnson, not typically aligned with Raskin on DOJ matters, called the surveillance "not appropriate."
Raskin, Jayapal, and Garcia demanded new protocols including terminals within the Capitol Complex — removing DOJ from physical control of the review process.
The Structural Critique
Raskin's January 31 letter and subsequent actions articulate a specific structural critique: DOJ treated the 58% release as complete, offered no mechanism for external verification, and then surveilled the members of Congress who tried to verify it themselves. The 200,000 withheld pages are not a disagreement about completeness — they are pages DOJ acknowledges exist and chose not to release (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
The $1.5 billion in bank transactions represents a financial universe that four major institutions processed over years, generating compliance records, Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs — reports banks must file when they detect potential financial crime), and internal communications. Those records would directly fill the gaps our pipeline identified: the 468,000 missing entities estimated by the Chao1 species richness model (a statistical method for estimating how many total species exist based on a partial sample), the unresolved wire transfers, the corporate relationships visible only through bank-side data (PAPER TRAIL Project, 2026).
Raskin's letter made the number public. Whether the underlying records follow is a question of enforcement — and the law he helped pass contains no penalty for the answer being no.
References
C-SPAN. (2026, February 11). Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before House Judiciary Committee. https://www.c-span.org/program/house-committee/attorney-general-pam-bondi-testifies-before-house-judiciary-committee-part-1/673053
Epstein Files Transparency Act, Pub. L. No. 119-38 (2025).
PAPER TRAIL Project. (2026). Congressional actions, February 2026 [Data set].
PAPER TRAIL Project. (2026). DOJ compliance status [Data set].
PAPER TRAIL Project. (2026). External government sources [Data set].
Raskin, J. (2026, January 31). Letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche re: Epstein files. U.S. House Judiciary Committee Democrats. https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov
Wyden, R. (2025, July 17). Wyden unveils details of Treasury's undisclosed Epstein file. U.S. Senate Finance Committee. https://www.finance.senate.gov