President Donald Trump’s administration has dispatched hundreds of federal prosecutors, including from the country’s most prestigious U.S. attorney’s office, to comb over the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files for release, reported Politico on Thursday morning.
Congress overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act at the end of last year, after Trump spent months trying to pressure Republicans into killing it. Despite this, the administration has only released a fraction of the files they were legally required to by this point.
According to the report, they are working on it — but the process of redacting and reviewing them is taking up critical amounts of Justice Department resources, particularly in the Southern District of New York.
“Virtually every prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who isn’t handling an imminent or ongoing trial — including some who are working on other major cases — has been tasked with helping to review more than two million files to redact information about Epstein’s sex-trafficking victims,” said the report. “Even the high-ranking executive staff and unit chiefs are poring over the documents, often working weekends.”
One person close to the effort said the attorneys are being “crushed by the work,” and it could take at least a few more weeks, with no clear timeline on exactly when it will be completed.
Release of the Epstein files has been a massive wedge issue for the Republican Party, as Trump was friends with Epstein for many years and doesn’t want it in the public spotlight, but many of his most ardent supporters have demanded all the files for years, hopeful it could implicate Democrats or liberal celebrities.
This comes as some Republicans who backed the release of the files now appear unconcerned that the administration is not in compliance with the law to do so, and experts warn that donors of the president could potentially be leaning on him to try to keep their names out of the final release.
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