WASHINGTON — On Friday afternoon, the Department of Justice made public its investigatory files on the late sex predator Jeffrey Epstein… sort of.
Congress passed a law last month giving the Trump administration 30 days to put the material in a public, searchable and downloadable database. Despite fighting it for months, the president eventually signed the legislation.
The new website, calling itself The Epstein Library, includes browsable catalogues of thousands of PDF documents from the government’s investigations of Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 after being charged with sex trafficking minors.
The site also includes a search function, though queries for names of people known to have associated with Epstein ― including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump ― turned up no results when HuffPost accessed the site on Friday afternoon. A disclaimer notes that many records are handwritten and may not appear in the search function.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested earlier Friday that while the DOJ has “been working tirelessly since that day” to make the files public, the department may not fully comply with the deadline set by The Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks. So today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said in an interview with “Fox and Friends.”
The new website says it “will be updated if additional documents are identified for release.”
The law doesn’t spell out penalties for noncompliance. It gives the Justice Department leeway to withhold personally identifying material related to victims and matters related to ongoing investigations.
In response to Blanche’s comments, Democrats said the Trump administration has defied the law.
“Donald Trump and the Department of Justice are now violating federal law as they continue covering up the facts and the evidence about Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long, billion-dollar, international sex trafficking ring,” Reps. Robert Garcia (Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (Md.) said in a joint statement. “We are now examining all legal options in the face of this violation of federal law.”
Blanche defended the president’s stance on the issue, baselessly claiming that Trump has long favored making the full documents public.
“Just so everybody appreciates, President Trump has said for years that he wants full transparency, and he wants the Department of Justice to release everything that we can with respect to this investigation and cases,” Blanche said.
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Despite Blanche’s claims, the Trump administration has not delivered such transparency and the president himself dismissed demands for the files’ release as a Democratic “hoax.” He only called on congressional Republicans to support the bill co-sponsored by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), after it became clear its passage was inevitable.
Massie said there will be ways to know if the administration has not released all it should. He also noted that the law will be binding on future attorneys general.
“The victims know 20 accused that should be in those files. If we don’t see them in the files, they’re not releasing them,” Massie told HuffPost this week.
Trump, a onetime friend of Epstein’s, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to the disgraced financier. However, Epstein claimed Trump knew about his criminal activity, according to emails made public by House Oversight Democrats earlier this year. The Republican-led committee has obtained tens of thousands of documents from Epstein’s estate — a trove of material that’s entirely separate from what’s at the Justice Department, which declined to prosecute Epstein in 2008, despite significant evidence of sex trafficking crimes, but then brought charges in 2019. The committee has also obtained some of the Justice Department’s Epstein files after it sent a subpoena.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair in an interview published this week that Trump is mentioned repeatedly in the DOJ documents, but that he’s not implicated in “anything awful.”
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Friday is a momentous day for survivors of Epstein’s abuse, including Maria Farmer, who alleged that Epstein and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving out a 20-year sentence, sexually assaulted her in the 1990s.
“This is a moment for which I have waited three entire decades, over half of my life,” Farmer said in a statement shared with CNN.
The DOJ’s National Security Division has been working to redact the documents, CNN and Reuters reported. While the law allowed for some redactions, including for any information that could jeopardize an ongoing federal investigation or prosecution, the bill specifies that “no record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”