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Investigative Body

The House Oversight Committee has released a collection of approximately 70 photos from the estate of former convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

This represents the third such disclosure from a cache of more than 95,000 photographs the panel has acquired from Epstein's holdings. It includes pictures of passages from the book Lolita inscribed across a female's body, and censored images of female foreign passports.

This disclosure comes hours before the 19 December cut-off for the DOJ to release all records connected to its probe into Epstein.

"These new photographs pose more inquiries about what exactly the Department of Justice has in its possession," said the ranking member of the panel, Robert Garcia.

What's in the Images Disclosed

A number of the images published on Thursday show Epstein conversing with scholar and advocate Noam Chomsky on a private jet; Bill Gates positioned next to a woman whose face is obscured; Steve Bannon seated at a desk opposite Epstein, and former Alphabet president Sergey Brin at a dinner gathering.

Oversight Panel

These are the newest wealthy, influential men to be seen in Epstein's estate images published by the oversight panel - earlier published images also include US President Donald Trump and ex-president Bill Clinton, as well as director Woody Allen, previous US treasury secretary Larry Summers, counsel Alan Dershowitz, Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor, and additional individuals.

Showing up in the images is is not considered evidence of any illegal activity, and several of the pictured men have said they were never involved in Epstein's criminal activity.

In a statement issued alongside the photograph disclosure, Democrats on the US House Oversight Committee stated the Epstein estate did not supply context or timings for the pictures.

"Photographs were chosen to offer the American people with transparency into a representative sample of the photos acquired from the estate, and to provide understanding into Epstein's associates and his extremely troubling activities," the statement reads.

Committee

The publication also features multiple photographs of quotes from the Vladimir Nabokov literary work Lolita written in black ink across several locations of a woman's body, like her torso, feet, hip, and back. Lolita narrates the story of a adolescent who was groomed by a adult literature professor.

A particular quote from the book written across a female's torso says, "Lolita's name: the point of the tongue making a journey of three steps down the roof of the mouth to tap, at three, on the teeth".

The release also contains a series of photos of female travel documents and official papers from countries around the world, including Lithuania, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

Committee

The majority of the details on the papers, like identities and DOBs, is redacted but the panel stated in a statement that the travel documents pertain to "females whom Jeffrey Epstein and his associates were engaging".

An additional photo shows Epstein seated at a workstation intimately in the company of three women whose faces have been redacted - a first has her palm on Epstein's chest under his shirt, and another individual is crouching to look at a nearby computer. Epstein can be seen to be helping the third attach a bracelet.

Oversight Panel

Another photograph disclosed is a capture of SMS messages from an unidentified sender who says they have been supplied "several females" and are demanding "$one thousand dollars for each individual".

Photograph Publication Arrives Before DOJ Deadline

The committee has thousands of images in its holdings from the Epstein holdings, which are "simultaneously graphic and mundane," its press release on Thursday explained.

The House Oversight Committee first legally compelled the property of Epstein, who was found dead in a New York prison in 2019 while pending legal proceedings on allegations of sex trafficking crimes, in August.

The photos and files the Epstein estate's representatives gave to the committee are separate from what is often referred to "the Epstein files". That material are documents under the Department of Justice's possession connected to its separate probe into Epstein.

Under the Transparency Act, which President Trump signed into law recently, the DOJ has until the date of 19 December to publish its files. The extent of what is found in the DOJ's documents is not publicly known, and it's probable that a significant portion of the information will be extensively redacted, akin to House Oversight Committee documents