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The US Department of Justice has published thousands of documents relating to the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, partially fulfilling a congressional order — signed by Donald Trump — to release the files.
The disclosures, published on the department’s website on Friday, mark the latest chapter in a long-running saga that has gripped Washington and ignited a political firestorm on both sides of the Atlantic, amid questions about Epstein’s ties to rich and powerful figures, including the US president.
But they are unlikely to silence critics who have accused the administration of blocking information about the Epstein case. Deputy attorney-general Todd Blanche earlier on Friday acknowledged that the DoJ would not release all the materials in its possession right away. He told Fox News “several hundred thousand” would be published on Friday, and “several hundred thousand more” would be made public “over the next couple of weeks”.
It was not immediately clear how many documents the DoJ published on Friday, or how much of the material had been redacted. But the federal government created a website that it described as a “library” of materials, including court records and evidence collected by federal prosecutors.
Trump did not comment on the publication of the documents just ahead of their release on Friday. In a rare move he declined to take questions from reporters at an event at the White House on Friday afternoon with pharmaceutical executives.
“I really don’t want to soil it up by asking questions, even questions that are very fair questions that I’d love to answer. So I think we have to just stop right here,” he said.
Friday’s release came a day after Democratic legislators published a new batch of photographs from the Epstein estate, showing prominent figures such as Bill Gates and Sergey Brin. The House oversight committee is running its own investigation into Epstein, separate from the DoJ.
Trump and top Republicans on Capitol Hill had for months sought to block the release of the DoJ’s files, which include evidence gathered during multiple criminal and civil investigations into Epstein and his associates.
The strategy angered some parts of the president’s Maga base, given that on the campaign trail he had said he would release the so-called Epstein files.
But a bipartisan vote in Congress last month compelled the justice department to publish its files. The president signed the measure into law on November 19.
The legislation gave US attorney-general Pam Bondi 30 days to hand over the materials but allowed the department to withhold files that could jeopardise active federal investigations or pose national security concerns. Friday was the deadline.
Blanche on Friday told Fox News that some of the materials released would be redacted to ensure “every victim . . . is completely protected”.
Trump and Republicans have sought to shift the public’s focus to Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats and their supporters, including former president Bill Clinton, former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.
But questions remain about Trump’s links to Epstein, who was found dead in his jail cell in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.
Trump has acknowledged he and Epstein were once friends but said they had a falling out more than two decades ago. He has vehemently denied any involvement in Epstein’s criminal activities.
Still, the separate congressional investigation into Epstein has piled political pressure on the president.
Last month, the House oversight committee published more than 20,000 previously unseen documents from the late financier’s estate, including a 2011 email in which he said Trump was the “dog that hadn’t barked” and “spent hours at my house” with a woman later identified as a victim of sex trafficking.
Undated photographs published last week by Democrats on the House committee also showed images of Trump, who appeared alongside the financier in one image.
The president dismissed the pictures, telling reporters there were “hundreds and hundreds of people that have photos with him”. A White House spokesperson accused Democrats of “selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions to try and create a false narrative”.
Clinton also appeared in images from the Epstein estate, as did Virgin founder Richard Branson, among other figures from politics, technology and big business.
There was no suggestion that those pictured in the latest images released from the Epstein estate had committed any wrongdoing.
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