USA (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – The Trump administration says about 700,000 Jeffrey Epstein case files still require review, delaying public release by at least another week.
A 200-person team has reviewed and published almost 750,000 documents in the late convicted sex offender’s case thus far, a Trump administration insider told Axios, which cites a “palpable sense of exasperation” with the situation behind closed doors.
It comes after the Justice Department’s largest-ever document release on Tuesday, which included hundreds of emails and other correspondence from law enforcement and prosecutors looking into Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein following his 2019 prison death that was determined to be a suicide.
The materials made public on Tuesday made numerous references to President Donald Trump, who had a long-term association with Epstein until the early 2000s.
A person’s existence in the files does not imply criminality, and Trump is not charged with any wrongdoing related to his crimes. He was quickly defended by the Justice Department, which said that the papers contained “untrue and sensationalist claims” that were allegedly meant to sway the 2020 presidential election.
The administration is still plagued by the controversy, which is made worse by the extensively redacted papers and its “clumsy” and incomplete document release.
Despite a federal legislation signed by Trump that required the government to publicly disclose whatever it had by December 19, there was immediate criticism when the Justice Department failed to release all of the long-awaited materials in its possession.
“There’s a palpable sense of exasperation and annoyance in the administration about all of the headlines pertaining to Trump and Epstein and the inability to explain everything and just get the disclosure done,”
Axios noted.
Officials are growing “frustrated” with the saga as it shows few signs of abating.
“It’s a combination of extreme frustration at everything: at what Congress did, at our response to it, and a concern that it won’t go away,”
an official told the outlet.
“This will end soon,”
another official told Axios.
“The conspiracy theories won’t.”
The outlet claims that many of the 700,000 documents that need to be vetted are duplicates, so not all of them will be made public. However, thousands more are expected to arrive within the next week.
The public’s knowledge of the extent of Epstein’s crimes and his ties to an alleged sex trafficking ring that is accused of abusing and exploiting young girls has not improved despite the Justice Department’s release of about 30,000 files on Tuesday. The materials are heavily redacted and are primarily shared without any context.
The most recent batch had numerous references to Trump, leading the agency to declare in a statement that some of the material is “fake.”
“There has been lots of sensationalism and even outright lies these past few days about the ‘Epstein Files,’”
deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Monday night in a statement on X.
“But let’s separate fact from fiction. Document production is just that. We produce documents, and sometimes this can result in releasing fake or false documents because they simply are in our possession because the law requires this.”
Among the records made public by the Justice Department
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