US: Citing worries about victim safety, the Justice Department missed the deadline for releasing the whole Epstein files
US: According to Politico, the US Department of Justice has declared that it would not disclose all papers pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein by the Friday deadline, citing the necessity to preserve the names and private information of the victims.
Although hundreds of thousands of papers have been made public, more will be published in the next weeks, according to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
As stated by Blanche in an interview with Fox News, the department will “release several hundred thousand documents today.”
However, he conceded that not all of the DOJ’s materials related to the late financier’s inquiry will be released on Friday.
But the DOJ said, “Ridiculous framing,” in a post on X about a Politico article. A huge batch of new records that the Biden and Obama administrations declined to make public are being released by the DOJ. The narrative here is that the Trump administration is offering levels of openness that were never even considered by previous administrations. As we carefully seek to safeguard victims, we are meeting the first deadline.
“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. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”
According to Politico, the delay suggests that the White House seems to be in violation of a legislation that US President Donald Trump signed in November requiring the full disclosure of all non-exempt Epstein information within 30 days.
According to Politico, a Department of Justice official refused to elaborate on Blanche’s remarks, stating that they speak for themselves.
“President Trump signed that law 30 days ago,” Blanche said on Fox News. “And we have been working tirelessly since that day to make sure that we get every single document that we have within the Department of Justice, review it and get it to the American public.”
A spokesman for Thomas Massie (R-Ky), who spearheaded the successful discharge petition drive that ultimately led to the law’s enactment, referred to a video on X on Thursday when asked whether he would know if the administration had complied with his disclosure requirements. Epstein thinks the FBI has at least 20 names of persons accused of sex crimes based on his interactions with the attorneys representing his victims.
“If we get a large production on December 19, and it does not contain a single name of any male who is accused of a sex crime or sex trafficking or rape or any of these things, then we know they haven’t produced all the documents,” he said. “It’s that simple.”
In a statement, Ro Khanna (D-California), who worked with Massie to advance the discharge petition, said that “if DOJ is producing real documents of interest that are not overly redacted, and if they are clear about a timeline for full production, then that is a positive step.”