Greg Sargent writes:

Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but they also call for creative ones. Faced with a criminal president and a GOP congressional majority that’s wholly devoted to shutting down any and all transparency and accountability for him, Democrats will have to get increasingly resourceful in their efforts to crack through that facade. The very tentative good news is: They actually have options to do just that.

This is why you should pay attention to the news that Senate Democrats are now exercising an obscure, rarely used law to try to force transparency on the so-called Epstein files.

The New York Times reports that seven Democrats on the upper chamber’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee just sent a letter to DOJ demanding that it turn over the information it has compiled related to the investigation pursuant to the 2019 arrest of Jeffrey Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, using a decades-old statute:

Under a section of federal law commonly referred to in the Senate as the “rule of five,” government agencies are required to provide relevant information if any five members of that committee, which is the chamber’s chief oversight panel, request it.

The letter spells out exactly what Democrats are demanding, calling for the release of “all documents, files, evidence, or other materials in the possession of DOJ or FBI related to” Epstein’s prosecution, including “audio and video recordings” and much more. [Continue reading…]