The Justice Department said late Monday it is still poring through millions of documents that may be related to Jeffrey Epstein, as the Trump administration grapples with a congressional mandate to release all of its files on the late sex offender.
The legal deadline to make the records public was Dec. 12. But the department has argued the sheer volume of documents that need to be found, uploaded, reviewed, redacted and published has forced it to instead release the files online on a rolling basis, with a series of enormous document dumps over the course of several days in mid-December.
In a legal filing Monday, the Justice Department told a judge it has released about 12,285 documents so far, totaling some 125,575 pages. More than 2 million documents that may need to be released under the law are still “in various phases of review.”
That means the department has reviewed less than 1% of its total possible records on Epstein, though it noted that it believes a “meaningful portion” of the still-unreviewed documents are duplicates. It also said the documents’ page counts vary widely.
The documents that are under review include internal Justice Department and FBI emails, court filings, notes from FBI interviews, records from subpoenas and “various forms of media,” the court filing said.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in mid-November, gave the Justice Department 30 days to release a wide swath of files on Epstein and his convicted associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. That includes decades-old records from the earliest federal investigations into Epstein, documents from Epstein and Maxwell’s 2019 and 2020 sex trafficking cases and files from the Justice Department’s review of Epstein’s death by suicide while in pre-trial custody.
The law allows the Justice Department to redact victims’ personal information, child sexual abuse material, images that show bodily injuries and a small handful of other categories.
The Manhattan judge in Maxwell’s case, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmeyer, has also required the top prosecutor in the district to “personally certify” that any grand jury materials that are released have been “rigorously reviewed” to take out victims’ identities. The Justice Department’s revelations Monday about the number of files appeared in a letter to Engelmeyer.
Over 400 Justice Department lawyers are involved in the review process, the filing said.
It’s not clear how long it will take the department to release all of the files, or when the next tranche will be made public. The Justice Department revealed on Christmas Eve that it had discovered over a million new documents, and reviewing them could take “a few more weeks.”
The Justice Department has defended its handling of the files, arguing it needs to release them on a rolling schedule in order to protect victims’ personal information.
But the department’s pace — and the fact that it missed Congress’ deadline — has drawn backlash from congressional Democrats and Epstein survivors. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused the department of a “cover-up” last month.
“The law Congress passed is crystal clear: release the Epstein files in full so Americans can see the truth,” Schumer said in a statement.
