Democrats and one Republican have demanded the release of millions more pages from the Epstein investigation, accusing the Trump administration of a “full-blown cover-up” after it declared the probe closed. The justice department released over three million new pages on Friday, which Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said represented the final compliance with legislation ordering full disclosure. “This review is over,” Blanche told ABC’s This Week on Sunday, noting that over six million pieces of paper, thousands of videos and tens of thousands of images had been reviewed.
However, Democrats including Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin and California congressman Ro Khanna, along with Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, insist that millions more documents are being deliberately withheld. Raskin told CNN’s State of the Union that only half of the six million potentially responsive documents had been released, with more than 10,000 redactions. “We are witnessing a full-blown cover-up,” he said, adding that a federal law compelled the department to turn over all documents.
Raskin wrote to Blanche on Saturday demanding unredacted access to the released materials, which contained sordid new details of Epstein’s abuse, including alleged trafficking of victims to other men. Names of prominent figures such as Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew appeared in the documents, though all have denied wrongdoing. Blanche insisted the department had “nothing to hide,” but Raskin called this claim implausible given the incomplete release.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries told ABC that “it’s not over and will not be over until there is full and complete transparency.” Ro Khanna, co-author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, said the justice department had “released at best half the documents” and described the scandal as “one of the largest in our country’s history.” He noted that survivors’ lawyers reported ongoing upset among victims, particularly over accidental release of their names.
On Monday, the justice department removed several thousand documents from the Friday release that may have inadvertently included victim-identifying information. This followed court filings by lawyers representing over 200 Epstein victims, who demanded the removal of a website hosting the documents. The lawyers stated that victims had expected previous redaction errors would not be repeated, but that “expectation was shattered” on 30 January.
