After years of legal battles and online speculation, the Justice Department on Friday will release what a senior Justice Department official says are “several hundred thousand” documents from investigations into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, whose connection to the rich and powerful and his death by suicide in 2019 has spawned dozens of conspiracy theories.
The Justice Department faces a Friday deadline for the release of all remaining Epstein files after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act last month following blowback to the administration. seeking the release of materials.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in an interview Friday morning on Fox and Friends, said, “I expect that today we will release several hundred thousand documents… and then over the next two weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.”
“The most important thing the attorney general has talked about is that [FBI] Director [Kash] Patel has talked about, is that we protect victims, so what we’re doing is looking at every piece of paper that we’re going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story, to the extent that it needs to be protected, is completely protected,” Blanche said. “Those documents will come in different forms, photographs and other materials associated with all of the investigations into Mr. Epstein.”
The Epstein Records Act says the Justice Department “may withhold or redact” the identities of Epstein’s victims and contains exemptions that would allow the Justice Department to withhold records that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution.”
Blanche said “there are a lot of eyes” reviewing the documents to make sure the victims’ identities have been redacted. In recent weeks, the Justice Department has recruited dozens of lawyers from the National Security Division to conduct the review, according to sources familiar with the matter.
He further suggested in the interview that the administration’s review has been partially paralyzed by a ruling by a judge in the Southern District of New York that required the administration to verify that its review fully protects victims’ identities.
This photo provided by the New York State Sex Offender Registry shows Jeffrey Epstein on March 28, 2017.
New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP, File
When asked if the American public should expect more criminal cases to emerge after the release of the files, Blanche said, “Look, as the president ordered, it is still being investigated, and I hope that continues to happen. So, as of today, there are no new charges at the moment, but we are investigating.”
President Donald Trump recently ordered the Justice Department to investigate high-profile Democrats associated with Epstein, a task that Attorney General Pam Bondi then referred to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The Justice Department and the FBI announced in July that they would not release additional files on Epstein, after several senior officials, including Patel and outgoing FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, accused the government of shielding information about the Epstein case before joining the administration.
The Senate later voted to approve Epstein’s House-passed transparency bill, after which President Donald Trump signed it into law.
Trump’s critics have speculated about the extent to which the president, who had a friendship with Epstein until they had a fall circa 2004, appears in Epstein’s files, while Trump has accused several well-known Democrats of having ties to the disgraced financier.
“Perhaps the truth about these Democrats and their associations with Jeffrey Epstein will soon be revealed, because I JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!” Trump wrote on social media after signing the bill.
Epstein owned two private islands in the Virgin Islands and large estates in New York City, New Mexico, and Palm Beach, Florida, where he was investigated for allegedly luring underage girls to his seaside home for massages that turned sexual. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for sex crimes after reaching a controversial non-prosecution agreement with the US attorney’s office in Miami.
In 2019, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York accused Epstein of “sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of underage girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.
Epstein committed suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.
