The Justice Department on Friday dropped more than 3 million pages of documents from its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, completing the release of its records as mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference.
“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive documentation, document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance with the [Epstein Files Transparency] Act,” Blanche said.
The new documents contain 2,000 videos and 18,000 images, not all of which were taken by Epstein or someone around him, Blanche said. They include “large quantities of commercial pornography” and images seized from Epstein’s devices, he added.
Friday’s release comes more than a month after the Justice Department missed a legal deadline to release in full its documents related to the late financier, which sparked intense bipartisan criticism.
Blanche said the DOJ withheld some documents for reasons permitted by the law, including files with personal identifying information about Epstein’s victims, material that depicted child sexual abuse and death or violence, and “anything that would jeopardize an active federal investigation.”
He maintained the department is not holding anything back.
“There’s not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding,” Blanche said, adding that the DOJ has “complied with the Act.”
In a Jan. 27 court filing, the Justice Department said it had finished redacting “millions of pages of materials” related to Epstein and that it expected to release “substantially all” of the documents in the “near term.”
But that filing, and Friday’s release, came more than a month after the department failed to meet a congressionally mandated deadline to force it to publicly release all documents in its possession related to Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Congress in November passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in a near-unanimous vote. The act gave the Justice Department a 30-day deadline to make public all unclassified records, documents, communications and investigative materials in its possession concerning Epstein and Maxwell. That 30-day release period ended on Dec. 19. In the final hours leading up to the deadline, the Justice Department began releasing troves of photographs, emails and heavily redacted documents. But that release, and two that followed shortly after, only amounted to 12,285 documents. More than 2 million documents related to Epstein and Maxwell went unreleased, according to a Jan. 5 court filing. The act, which Trump signed swiftly into law under pressure from lawmakers in his own party, set a high bar for the information the Justice Department could withhold from the public. It allowed exceptions for documents that would publicly identify Epstein’s victims and information that could jeopardize national security. And it allowed the department to temporarily withhold information that would put at risk ongoing federal investigations and prosecutions. This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News. Recommended
