Journalist who broke open Jeffrey Epstein's crimes demands to know why Justice Department tracked her travel
The journalist who first exposed Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, the Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown, is wondering why one of her flight logs was part of the Justice Department's files release on the convicted predator.
The DOJ has released about 130,000 pages on the Epstein case thus far, as part of a law passed by Congress.
While President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton are prominent throughout, many of the documents lack context, and so, while politically problematic, they do not constitute evidence for crimes.
In an X post on Sunday, Brown shared a heavily redacted document from the Epstein trove that included her full name and a series of American Airlines flights booked for July 2019 to Little Rock, Arkansas.
'Does somebody at the DOJ want to tell me why my American Airlines booking information and flights in July 2019 are part of the Epstein Files (attached to a grand jury subpoena)?' she asked. 'As the flight itinerary includes my maiden name (and I did book this flight) why was the DOJ monitoring me?'
Brown did not immediately respond to the Daily Mail's request for comment on whether she had been provided an explanation by the DOJ.
The DOJ also did not respond to a request for comment.
In a Substack post Sunday, Brown went into greater detail on why she booked the trip to Little Rock.
The Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown (left) is wondering why the Department of Justice subpoenaed one of her flight records and included it in a new batch of files as part of the Jeffrey Epstein (right) case
Brown said she was heading to Arkansas's state capital to interview Epstein victims Maria and Annie Farmer.
Maria Farmer was the first victim to report Epstein to the FBI in 1996.
Her sister, Annie Farmer, was also an Epstein victim and has become one of the highest-profile victims to date.
Brown said she didn't get a chance to interview the sisters as part of her groundbreaking three-part series, Perversion of Justice, which was published in November 2018 and got prosecutors back on Epstein's case.
She planned to do so during the 2019 Arkansas trip, but she ended up never taking it.
That's because Epstein was arrested upon arriving at his private plane at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.
He would be arraigned the next day, and Brown's editors at the Miami Herald wanted her to be in New York for that instead.
Brown's flight log was among six to eight others, she observed, including an August 2019 flight itinerary belonging to Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
On Sunday, the Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown shared a document that was part of the DOJ's Epstein files release: flight information that belonged to her
The records show Maxwell flying to Manchester, New Hampshire, from Los Angeles on August 4, 2019, several days before Epstein's death.
Maxwell was found hiding out in Bradford, New Hampshire, when she was arrested less than a year later.
'Most of the names attached to the other itineraries are redacted,' Brown wrote. 'This could perhaps be because they were victims' names.'
'They are all attached to a Grand Jury subpoena signed in February 2020 by a records custodian for American Airlines,' Brown said.
The American Airlines subpoena came after the August 10, 2019, death of Epstein, which was classified as a suicide, as investigators turned their attention to Maxwell.
Maxwell was charged in July 2020.
'I have no idea whether the DOJ was monitoring me, or whether it was monitoring Annie and Maria,' Brown said.
'Either way, the DOJ has some explaining to do. I’m not sure why they would have been monitoring any of us during this time span,' she added.
Her plea was echoed by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
'The Department of Justice needs to explain why travel information and booking itineraries for a journalist are in the Epstein files,' the Democrats' committee account said Sunday.
