A senior official at the Department of Justice was secretly recorded on a fake Hinge date by an undercover operative, alleging that the Trump administration is working to cover up “thousands and thousands of pages” related to the Jeffrey Epstein files, with the intent to “redact every Republican” named in the files.
Joseph Schnitt, acting deputy chief at the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations, made a series of claims about the case while on a Hinge date he believed to be real. The footage was uploaded to X on Thursday by James O’Keefe, the founder of the right-wing activist group Project Veritas
The claims come in the wake of President Donald Trump calling the files a “Democrat hoax” and “irrelevant to the success of the nation,” and two months after Attorney General Pam Bondi denied the existence of any so-called “client list” in the Epstein files.
In the secret recording, Schnitt was asked about the existence of the Epstein files. “There’s files, for sure,” Schnitt told his date. Schnitt said there was “internal conflict” about how to handle the files, with Schnitt calling Bondi a “yes-person.”
“I don’t know what Bondi wants. Bondi wants whatever Trump wants,” Schnitt said, adding that any new release of files would be “heavily redacted” and any mention of Trump “won’t be in it.”
“They’ll redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, Democratic people in those files,” Schnitt predicted, claiming the would-be report “very slanted.”
Schnitt also alleged that the DOJ was giving Epstein associate and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell a “benefit” by moving her from a high-security prison in Florida a minimum security prison in Texas “to keep her mouth shut.”
“She got transferred to a minimum security prison, too, recently, which is against BOP [Bureau of Prisons] policy because she’s a convicted sex offender and they’re not supposed to get minimum security prisons, which is an interesting detail because she’s getting a benefit, which means they’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut,” he said in the video.
Following the fallout from the video, Schnitt in a statement said the comments were his “personal comments” and only came from “what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done at or learned from work.”
“I have no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Ms. Maxwell other than what is reported in the news,” Schnitt said in the statement.
https://t.co/N5BGMBZRTe pic.twitter.com/CFIly8IoHV
— U.S. Department of Justice (@TheJusticeDept) September 4, 2025
The DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs blasted the video, saying it had “zero bearing in reality” in a post on X.
“The comments in this video have absolutely zero bearing with reality and reflect a total lack of knowledge of the DOJ’s review process. The DOJ is committed to transparency and is in compliance with the House Oversight Committee’s request for documents,” the spokesperson said.
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