The Trump administration has declared its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein closed after releasing more than three million pages of documents, but Democrats and a Republican lawmaker have accused it of running a “full-blown cover-up” and demanded the release of millions more pages.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Sunday that the review was over, telling ABC's This Week: “We reviewed over six million pieces of paper, thousands of videos, thousands – tens of thousands of images … which is what the statute required us to do.” The release on Friday was the final act of compliance with legislation ordering full disclosure, he said.
Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House judiciary committee, told CNN's State of the Union that only about half of the documents had been made public. “They've said there are 6m potentially responsive documents there. They've only released 3m with more than 10,000 redactions. What about the other 3m files?” He wrote to Blanche on Saturday demanding that he and other Democrats be allowed to view the materials unredacted.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said the matter would not be over “until there is full and complete transparency”. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who co-authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act with Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, said he believed the justice department had “released at best half the documents”. He added that survivors' lawyers said survivors were upset that their names had been released without redaction.
On Monday, the justice department said it had removed several thousand documents from the Friday release that may have inadvertently included victim-identifying information. This followed a court filing by lawyers for more than 200 of Epstein's victims demanding that a website hosting the documents be taken down.
The documents released so far name Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, all former friends of Epstein, who have denied any wrongdoing. Epstein killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
