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Investigative Body

The House Oversight Committee has released a set of roughly 70 photos obtained from the property of late convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

This constitutes the third such release from a cache of more than 95,000 photos the committee has acquired from Epstein's estate. It features pictures of passages from the novel Lolita inscribed across a female's body, and censored photos of women's overseas passports.

This action comes hours before the December 19th due date for the DOJ to release all files related to its investigation into Epstein.

"These photos pose more questions about what exactly the DOJ has in its possession," stated the ranking member of the committee, Robert Garcia.

What is in the Images Disclosed

Several of the photographs published on this week feature Epstein in discussion with scholar and advocate Noam Chomsky aboard a private plane; Bill Gates positioned beside a female whose face is redacted; Steve Bannon sitting at a table facing Epstein, and previous Alphabet president Sergey Brin at a dinner event.

Investigative Body

These are the most recent affluent, powerful men to be seen in Epstein's estate photographs released by the House Oversight Committee - formerly disclosed pictures also depict US President Donald Trump and past president Bill Clinton, as well as director Woody Allen, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, counsel Alan Dershowitz, Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor, and other figures.

Being pictured in the photos is is not considered indication of any wrongdoing, and a number of the featured men have said they were not participating in Epstein's unlawful actions.

In a statement accompanying the photo publication, Lawmakers on the US House Oversight Committee noted the Epstein property holders did not supply background information or timings for the images.

"Photos were chosen to offer the general populace with openness into a representative sample of the photos received from the holdings, and to provide insights into Epstein's circle and his extremely troubling activities," the release states.

Committee

The publication also contains several photographs of quotes from the Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita written in ink across several locations of a woman's body, including her chest, foot, hipbone, and rear. Lolita recounts the tale of a young girl who was exploited by a adult literature professor.

An example of a quote from the book scrawled across a woman's chest reads, "Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue making a journey of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth".

There are also a series of images of female passports and official papers from countries around the world, such as Lithuania, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

Oversight Panel

The majority of the data on the papers, like names and dates of birth, is obscured but the panel said in a press release that the travel documents are associated with "females whom Jeffrey Epstein and his associates were interacting with".

Another image features Epstein sitting at a desk closely surrounded by three women whose features have been censored - one has her hand on Epstein's torso under his shirt, and a second is leaning to view a adjacent laptop. Epstein seems to be assisting the third individual put on a bracelet.

Committee

A further image made public is a image of digital messages from an unknown person who says they have been sent "several females" and are requesting "$$1,000 for each individual".

Photograph Release Arrives Ahead of DOJ Cut-off

The body has a vast number of photographs in its holdings from the Epstein holdings, which are "at once explicit and everyday," its announcement on Thursday noted.

The oversight panel first subpoenaed the estate of Epstein, who was found dead in a New York correctional facility in 2019 while awaiting trial on allegations of sex trafficking crimes, in August.

The photos and documents the Epstein estate gave to the committee are separate from what is often called "the Epstein files". Those are records in the Department of Justice's possession associated with its own probe into Epstein.

Pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Donald Trump made law last month, the DOJ has until the date of 19 December to disclose its files. The full nature of what is included in the DOJ's records is not publicly known, and it's likely that a significant portion of the information will be heavily redacted, similar to the committee's documents