On Dec. 22 — three days past the congressionally mandated deadline for the Justice Department to release the entire trove of Epstein files — a top prosecutor in Florida sent an emergency request to employees in the Miami U.S. attorneys office.
The Justice Department immediately needed prosecutors over Christmas week to volunteer to review and redact information on documents from the sex-trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein so the materials could be released to the public.
“We have an obligation to the public to release these documents and before we can do so, certain redactions must be made to protect the identity of victims, among other things,” the email read, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. “I am aware that the timing could not be worse.”
That urgent request reflects the Justice Department’s choppy and often frenetic rollout of the massive Epstein investigatory files. In mid-November, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which ordered the release of nearly all unclassified government files on Epstein by Dec. 19, with necessary redactions to ensure that the identities of victims are protected.
Nearly a week past the deadline, the department appears to still be struggling to get its arms around the massive project and find an orderly way to make the files available to the public.
Officials announced on Wednesday that the FBI and prosecutors in New York had discovered “over a million” documents potentially related to the Epstein case, further dimming hopes for a quick process.
Asked about recruiting more prosecutors to review the documents, a Justice Department official said Wednesday that “we are whole heartedly committed to releasing everything to the public as quickly as possible.”
Justice Department officials have defended their process, saying they are following the law by releasing all the files. That includes files that they say contain false allegations against the president and others that they say are fabrications. On Tuesday, they said that a card Epstein purportedly wrote from jail shortly before his death, which was included in Monday’s release, is fake.
Officials have acknowledged missing the deadline but said that protecting the identities of victims trumps releasing all of the documents by Dec. 19.
“We are doing everything we’re supposed to be doing to comply with this statute,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
The files stem from the 2008 and 2019 sex-trafficking investigations of Epstein, a convicted sex offender, whose 2019 death while in federal custody was ruled a suicide, and the 2021 conviction of his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell on sex-trafficking charges. Some of the files are based on an investigation that occurred in the Southern District of Florida.
The laborious process to review and redact what may be as many as a million pages of documents has required about 200 attorneys from the Justice Department’s National Security Division to work around-the-clock since Thanksgiving, according to two people with knowledge of the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
But it hasn’t been enough.
The Justice Department released an initial batch of about 100,000 pages on Dec. 19 and warned that it would not be able to release the entire trove by the deadline. Since then, files have come out — sometimes in a trickle, other times in a rush — unannounced and generally with no clear explanation about what’s being provided.
Administration officials have so far amplified mentions of former president Bill Clinton in the files on social media, while publicly stating that some damaging mentions of President Donald Trump in the files are lies.
Some of the released files contain massive and often hard-to-explain redactions, prompting objections from lawmakers and some of Epstein’s victims and their lawyers that the Justice Department is violating the newly passed law, which states that no document should be withheld or redacted on the basis of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”
“DOJ did break the law by making illegal redactions and by missing the deadline,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who co-sponsored the bipartisan transparency law, posted on social media. Justice Department officials have denied that, saying the law requires them to review the documents and appropriately redact them.
On Monday, officials hit another hiccup when they posted a batch of more than 10,000 documents, only to take them down a few hours later. The files were put back up later that evening, but some of the files were in a different order, and it was unclear whether any files from the initial batch were missing. The Justice Department did not respond to questions on why the files were taken down and whether any were removed when they were re-uploaded.
It’s also unclear how many files are left to be released — and what the remaining files contain — but the email sent to prosecutors in South Florida suggests that the department is struggling to review what it has.
Trump’s inclusion in the files was no surprise. It has long been known that Trump had a years-long friendship with Epstein that ended in the early 2000s. And being mentioned in a mass trove of investigatory documents does not suggest criminal wrongdoing. Trump has not been accused of being involved in Epstein’s criminal activities and has denied knowing about them.
Still, the treatment of Trump in the files has fueled accusations from Democratic members of Congress and some others that the Justice Department could be working to protect the president.
Part of that concern stems from the fact that the administration has made clear that the attorney general reports to the president, breaking from long-standing norms that have given the Justice Department a degree of independence from the White House.
The speculation has also been driven by the seemingly confusing rollout of the files. The first batch of files, for example, contained multiple photos of Clinton and Epstein and few of Trump. Within that first release, more than a dozen files that the Justice Department initially uploaded late Friday were removed early Saturday. Among those files was a photo of an open drawer in Epstein’s New York home that contained many framed photos, including one of Trump. It was restored Sunday after the removal sparked public criticism.
After a second big release of files Monday that included more mentions of Trump, officials declared that some unspecified claims about Trump in the documents are “unfounded and false,” a disclaimer they had not made about other people mentioned in the documents.
The documents include several tips that were collected by the FBI about Trump’s involvement with Epstein and parties at their properties in the early 2000s. They also show that a subpoena was sent to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 for records that pertained to the government’s case against Maxwell.
The Justice Department has denied any special treatment of Trump.
As for the overall issue of dealing with the massive size of the Epstein files, one thing that’s clear is the problem is not a new one.
In one of the documents released Monday, an investigator in 2020 wrote about the need for a better system to catalogue documents.
The investigator wrote: “It’s basically impossible for us to keep track of what we’re getting.”
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