Justice Department releases huge trove of Jeffrey Epstein documents – The Washington Post
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Capitol Hill in October. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post)
Justice Department releases huge trove of Jeffrey Epstein documents
Hundreds of thousands of files are to be released today, with more in the weeks to come.
Updated, December 19, 2025 at 4:01 p.m. EST, 7 minutes ago, 8 min
By Mark Berman, Jeremy Roebuck and Perry Stein
The Justice Department began releasing a huge trove of documents Friday connected to the deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, partially complying with federal legislation that ordered officials to make public a collection of records long sought by his victims but entangled in political controversy.
The documents’ release,just ahead of a deadline imposed by the legislation, marks the next step of a months-long bipartisan push to force President Donald Trump and his administration to disclose more materials related to Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019 while facing charges of sex-trafficking and abusing girls.
The documents, which Justice Department officials said would amount to several hundred thousand pages, were expected to include extensive material that is normally shielded from public view. The materials could include grand jury testimony, investigative records, immunity deals, sealed settlements and internal communications related to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his ex-girlfriend and accomplice, who was convicted in 2021 on sex-trafficking charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Already, however, the administration was coming under fire from Democrats and some Republicans for not releasing all the documents by the deadline the law mandated.
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Friday morning, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, described the day’s planned release of documents as the first of several in the weeks to come.
Asked in an interview with Fox News about the volume of documents to be released, Blanche said: “Today, several hundred thousand. And then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.”
Department personnel had been racing against the clock to process the files, redacting information on victims, before the Friday deadline imposed by law, he said.
“What we’re doing is we are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story to the extent it needs to be protected is completely protected,” Blanche said.
Three federal judges ruled that the legislation requiring the release of these records, which Trump signed into law last month, overrode long-standing rules about grand jury secrecy. The judges stressed the need for officials to redact any information that could violate the privacy of Epstein’s victims.
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