Republican Sen. John Cornyn says that Rep. Jasmine Crockett's campaign launch in Texas' high-stakes 2026 Senate race is proof that "the Democratic Party has become the captive of the left wing."

Cornyn, the longtime senator from Texas who's facing arguably the toughest re-election of his political career, charged in a Fox News Digital interview that the bid by Crockett, a progressive champion and vocal critic and foil of President Donald Trump, shows that "even people like Chuck Schumer," the top Democrat in the Senate, "have been hijacked by the Bernie Sanders and AOC wing of the Democratic Party."

Crockett, a two-term lawmaker who represents a Dallas-area district, launched her bid earlier this month hours after former Rep. Colin Allred, a more moderate Democrat running a second straight time for the Senate in right-leaning Texas, ended his campaign.

Crockett will now face off in her party's March 3 primary with state Rep. James Talarico, a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian who is also seen as a rising Democrat. The general election showdown in Texas is one of a handful of midterm races that may determine if the GOP holds its Senate majority.

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Cornyn embraces Crockett's entry into the race.

"I think she is unelectable in a general election in Texas. Texas is still a conservative red state," Cornyn claimed. "She can't win, so I'm really happy she's decided to run."

While Crockett and Talarico face off for the Democratic nomination, Cornyn is battling Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt in a competitive and combustible Republican primary.

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And unlike the Democratic primary, where Crockett and Talarico are the only major candidates, the three-way Republican race may be headed towards a May runoff, which would be triggered if no candidate tops 50% in the March primary.

But Cornyn said that a GOP runoff won't "really change our chances of winning in November."

Cornyn is backed by Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) in the GOP primary.

NRSC chair Sen. Tim Scott predicts Cornyn will be the GOP's nominee, emphasizing in a Fox News Digital interview last week that "we are confident that Texas will be red, ruby red, with John Cornyn as our candidate."

Paxton, who has been battered over the past decade by a slew of scandals and legal problems and who is now dealing with a messy divorce, is a longtime MAGA champion and ally of Trump, who remains neutral in the Senate GOP primary race.

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Cornyn, highlighting his Trump credentials, noted that "I get along well with the President. I've supported him during his first term, and now in his second term, I think the figure we came up with was 99.3% of the time. So I want the president to be successful and look forward to continuing to support him and his policies."

But he acknowledged that "I don't think he's [Trump] in a big hurry to endorse. He says that both the attorney general and I are friends of his, and I don't think he wants to disappoint some of his friends who support one or the other of us, if he...goes to support one and not the other."

The Republican primary in Texas has become explosive, with charges flying from all sides.

But Cornyn, remaining more diplomatic than incendiary, merely touted that he would be the most effective general election candidate. And he pointed to Paxton and Hunt and argued, "They’re probably not going to be able to win, certainly by the same margin, and they might not be able to win at all because they're flawed candidates."

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"I've been through a lot of races before. This is nothing new for me, and we look forward to a good primary on March the third and probably a runoff that will finish the race off in May, and then we'll get ready for whoever the Democrats decide to nominate for November," he added.

Paxton campaign spokesman Nick Maddux, pushing back against Cornyn, told Fox News Digital, "Everyone knows that Jasmine Crockett, who said Hispanic Trump voters have a 'slave mentality,' is going to lose the general election miserably after winning the Democratic nomination. Cornyn's reciting this tired talking point about the general election because his sad campaign has nothing else to talk about it."

"Ken Paxton won his last statewide general election by nearly double digits, despite tens of millions in negative spending against him, and he'll do exactly that again in 2026," Maddux predicted.

Cornyn, who is running for a fifth six-year term representing Texas in the Senate, announced his re-election campaign in early March, with Paxton launching his primary challenge a month later.

Hunt, a West Point graduate who flew Apache helicopters during his Army service and a rising MAGA star who is in his second term representing a solidly Republican district in the Houston-area, jumped into the race in October.

As he declared his candidacy, Hunt showcased his own Trump credentials, saying, "I was the first person in the nation to endorse President Trump, and I have remained steadfast in my commitment to the people of Texas."

Hunt had been mulling a Senate run for months and sources confirmed to Fox News earlier this year that the congressman made his case to Trump’s political team that he's the only person who could win both a GOP primary and a general election.

Asked about Hunt, Cornyn claimed that "he can't win the primary. He can force a runoff."

And Cornyn said Hunt was "pretty headstrong and is determined to run, which is his right... but he also has a right to lose, which is what's going to happen."

The 44-year-old Hunt, responding to the 73-year-old senator's comments, told Fox News Digital that "Cornyn continues to lose support and now stands as the most vulnerable and ineffective incumbent in the country."

"He refuses to step aside and pass the torch to a new generation of leadership, one aligned with the America First movement and committed to codifying President Trump’s agenda, something Cornyn has spent years opposing in the United States Senate," Hunt charged.

If the Department of Justice (DOJ) wanted to release every Jeffrey Epstein-related document they had on file, they had the firepower to do so, a former assistant U.S. attorney argued.

The DOJ has faced bipartisan criticism over its initial release of heavily redacted Epstein files, which lawmakers argue fell short of the requirements of a recently passed transparency law.

"The Department of Justice has all the resources in the world, right? I mean if they wanted to put 1,000 lawyers on this to review the documents and get them ready for the production, they could have," Sarah Krissoff said.

"And they don’t appear to have done that," she added.

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The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Krissoff, who worked as a prosecutor for almost 14 years in the Southern District of New York, described key differences between the Epstein files and the normal redaction process that attorneys grapple with. Those distinctions make it unclear who would have had final say about the information the DOJ released on Friday as the agency attempted to follow through on the requirements laid out by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. 

That law, passed by Congress last month and signed by President Donald Trump on Nov. 19, gave the DOJ just 30 days to make its documentation of Epstein public. It included some exceptions for protecting the identity of victims.

Despite the thousands of files that became publicly available at the end of last week, the DOJ’s first trove sparked criticism from some lawmakers and viewers online outraged that the department hadn’t released them all at once.

"They are hiding a lot of documents. That would be very helpful in our investigation," Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., a member of the House Oversight Committee, told CNN on Monday morning. 

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Although she remains skeptical of the department’s effort, Krissoff noted that what the DOJ’s been asked to do goes far outside the norm for disclosures.

"There is no real mechanism in the law that the public can just access documents because they're interested in them, right? In this case, this law is requiring the DOJ to make these things public because so many members of Congress are interested in this issue," Krissoff said.

In the cases she’s been a part of, Krissoff said redactions usually came down to meticulous negotiations between the prosecution and the defense. Sometimes deliberations drilled into individual sentences or words.

"This situation is a little different because it's unclear, you know, who is still working on this from the original case team. And so, the question is: who at the Department of Justice reviewed these in connection with the redactions here?" Krissoff said.

She said whole case files rarely get released to the public beyond what shows up in court filings — and what’s there usually serves the narrow purposes of the prosecution. In Epstein’s case, the public’s interests extend beyond any potential conviction of Epstein himself. Epstein died in 2019 while incarcerated on suspicion of sex-trafficking minors. His death, ruled a suicide, cut short his prosecution and left behind questions about whether he facilitated illegal sexual encounters for his vast social network. 

Photos released by the DOJ last week lack context and do not, on their own, implicate anyone depicted in them of wrongdoing. 

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"The case file often implicates many other people that are not charged in the crimes. So, there may be 15 people charged in a drug ring. You've only charged one or two people; you don't want to impugn those other people who have not been charged by releasing information showing their involvement in this drug ring," Krissoff said.

"The last thing you want to do is put that neighbor's information or his name or even his statement out there," Krissoff said.

She believes that there’s a danger in forcing disclosure of an ongoing case simply because of great public interest and setting a precedent for that to become a regular occurrence. In her view, it could disrupt ongoing investigations of the future that draw intense public interest.

The DOJ said it will continue to release its documents on Epstein on a rolling basis. It has not announced when they expect to continue their release of the Epstein files.