Ro Khanna

Ro Khanna (born Rohit Khanna on September 13, 1976, in Philadelphia) is an American lawyer and Democratic politician who has represented California's 17th congressional district, in Silicon Valley, since January 2017.¹ He introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act with the Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie in July 2025 and, with Massie, forced it to a floor vote by discharge petition.²³

Background

Khanna's parents emigrated from India in the 1970s. He graduated in economics from the University of Chicago, where he canvassed for Barack Obama's 1996 campaign for the Illinois Senate, and took a law degree at Yale Law School. He served as a deputy assistant secretary of commerce in the Obama administration and taught economics at Stanford University. In the House he sits on the House Armed Services Committee, where he is ranking member of the subcommittee on cyber and innovative technologies, on the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and he is vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.⁴ On August 13, 2026, he wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, stating that the center had reportedly stopped publishing findings on content manipulation in its evaluations of Chinese AI models.⁵

The Transparency Act

Khanna introduced H.R. 4405 on July 15, 2025, "for himself and Mr. Massie."² Massie filed the discharge petition on September 2, 2025; it reached 218 signatures on November 12, and the House passed the bill 427 to 1 on November 18, the day before Donald Trump signed it.³⁶ On January 13, 2026, Khanna and Massie moved to appear as amici curiae in the closed criminal case United States v. Maxwell and asked Judge Paul Engelmayer to appoint "a special master or independent monitor" over the Department of Justice's compliance, telling the court that as of January 5 the department had "publicly released only 12,285 documents" and that "DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act." Engelmayer denied the motion on January 21, holding that the criminal case gave him no authority to supervise compliance with "a civil records-disclosure statute."⁷

The Six Names

On February 9, 2026, Khanna and Massie spent about two hours reading less-redacted files at the Justice Department. On the House floor the next day Khanna said that "70 to 80 percent of the files are still redacted" and that "there were six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason," and read their names: Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman and chief executive of DP World, and Leslie Wexner, "who was labeled as a 'co-conspirator' by the FBI." He asked: "If we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering up for in those three million files." He said appearing in the files was not evidence of a crime and that "none of this is designed to be a witch hunt."⁸⁹ A department spokesperson said four of the six appear in a single document, that Wexner is referenced nearly 200 times and bin Sulayem more than 4,700 times, and CBS News found that the files it reviewed did not appear to implicate the six in any crime.⁸ Wexner's representative said prosecutors had told his lawyers in 2019 that he was "neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect."¹⁰ Bin Sulayem, whom Massie had identified as the recipient of a 2009 Epstein email reading "I loved the torture video," did not respond to requests for comment and resigned from DP World on February 13, 2026; he has not been accused of a crime.¹¹

When the department sent Congress its list of about 300 "politically exposed persons" in the files on February 14, 2026, Khanna said it was "purposefully muddying the waters on who was a predator and who was mentioned in an email."¹² On March 4, 2026, the Oversight Committee, on which he sits, voted 24 to 19 to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi.¹³ After Trump removed her on April 2, Khanna told NPR: "Thomas Massie and I, with passing the Epstein Transparency Act, basically forced Donald Trump to fire his own attorney general."¹⁴ On September 1, 2026, he and Massie opened a discharge petition for a second bill giving members of Congress, state officials and survivors standing to sue the department over compliance.¹⁵