When the Justice Department began releasing documents about the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, they included a number of photographs of former President Bill Clinton, which administration officials quickly pointed out publicly.
On Tuesday, when a second batch of documents had repeated references to President Trump, including unverified or unsubstantiated accusations against him, the administration struck a notably different tone.
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement issued on social media. Such claims, the statement said, “are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
In November, Congress overcame resistance from Mr. Trump to pass a law requiring the public release of the remaining investigative files related to Mr. Epstein, who died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
That law required the release of the documents by Friday, when the Justice Department issued more than 100,000 pages of information, including many photos. But some photos were quickly removed from the online collection after concerns were raised about identifying victims.
One of the removed images showed a credenza with a slew of photographs on top of it, including one of Mr. Trump. Questioned about publishing, then removing, a photo of the president, Justice Department officials said that they had to review it for possible victims, and restored it to the online collection once they determined it did not show any.
The release of another 30,000 pages on Monday also proved difficult for the department, which posted them for a few hours in the afternoon before taking them down, only to put them back up late at night.
On Sunday, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the files.
The Justice Department’s first release “makes one thing clear: someone or something is being protected. We do not know whom, what or why. But we do know this, we need no such protection,” said Mr. Clinton’s spokesman, Angel Ureña, who called for the department to “immediately release any remaining materials referring to, mentioning, or containing a photograph of Bill Clinton.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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