‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive,‘ said the early nineteenth-century Scottish author, Sir Walter Scott, best best-selling writer of novels, plays, and poems.
From The New York Times:
Epstein Release Reveals New Photos but Many Files Are Withheld
The material includes thousands of documents and hundreds of images related to Jeffrey Epstein. But the Justice Department held back thousands more files despite a law requiring their disclosure by Friday.
Devlin BarrettAlan Feuer and Michael Gold
Reporting from Washington
An initial review of a thousands of government files and hundreds of photographs related to Jeffrey Epstein and released by the Justice Department on Friday produced new images, old investigative files and more questions about a scandal that has dogged the second Trump administration.
The full significance of the latest disclosure of Epstein files was unknown, given the volume of the material and the Justice Department’s acknowledgment that it had chosen to withhold many more documents, citing the privacy of victims and an ongoing investigation. Given the incomplete picture — as well as the huge public interest in Mr. Epstein, his crimes and those who traveled in his orbit — the release is as likely to revive the furor over the so-called Epstein files as quell it.
President Trump could have compelled the Justice Department to release all of its files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on his first day back in office in January, satisfying a promise he made to fervent supporters demanding transparency. Instead, he spent much of the past year denouncing critics, deflecting blame and changing the subject, allowing the issue to weaken his grip on his political base.
Before Mr. Trump ultimately relented under pressure and signed legislation in November directing the Justice Department to release its Epstein-related files, some of which became public on Friday, his administration and House Republicans released tens of thousands of documents. Many of those disclosures contained little new information and appeared aimed at tamping down criticism.
Here’s a look at those earlier disclosures:
February: Dud documents
Before joining the administration, Attorney General Pam Bondi helped fuel speculation about a government cover-up of Epstein-related documents. After being named to lead the Justice Department, she further stoked conspiratorial fervor among Mr. Trump’s supporters, telling Fox News that an Epstein “client list” was sitting on her desk and frequently suggesting that the administration would soon expose a sinister truth about Mr. Epstein’s death.
Seeking to appease that base, Ms. Bondi in late February teased the release of roughly 200 pages of documents she described as “breaking news.” She invited conservative influencers to the White House for a preview, handing out thick white binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”
The release proved anticlimactic. The documents contained little new information and largely consisted of flight logs that had long been public, a heavily redacted list of contacts and brief descriptions of items found at Mr. Epstein’s properties. The spectacle angered parts of Mr. Trump’s base, and some right-wing influencers turned on Ms. Bondi.
July: A push to move on
As frustration mounted, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department undertook an extensive review of more than 100,000 pages of Epstein-related material in an effort to find anything that might satisfy Mr. Trump’s supporters.
The effort yielded nothing new. The promised “Phase 2” never materialized, and in July the F.B.I. and the Justice Department instead issued a memo closing their investigation. It said that Mr. Epstein had died by suicide and found no incriminating evidence of additional perpetrators. The memo concluded that no specific “client list” existed, which earlier investigations had established.
Ms. Bondi and Mr. Trump urged the president’s supporters to move on. Many did not.
September: Subpoenaed Justice Department documents released
On Sept. 2, the House Oversight Committee released more than 33,000 pages of Epstein-related records that the Justice Department turned over in response to a subpoena that Democrats on the committee had effectively forced Republicans to issue. Although the subpoena sought all department files, only a portion was turned over. Many of the records released were already public court filings, and added little new information.
Nov. 12: Thousands of emails released from Epstein’s estate
On Nov. 12, Democrats on the oversight committee released three emails selected from thousands of documents provided by Mr. Epstein’s estate in response to a subpoena issued by the committee’s Republican chairman, Representative James Comer. In the emails, Mr. Epstein accused Mr. Trump of knowing more about the sex-trafficking operation than he had acknowledged.
In one email, Mr. Epstein wrote that Mr. Trump had spent hours at his home with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims. In another, he asserted that Mr. Trump “knew about the girls.”
Republicans on the committee condemned Democrats for selectively releasing messages that referred to Mr. Trump. Later that day, they released more than 20,000 documents from Mr. Epstein’s estate, including thousands of emails and text messages. The messages revealed much about Mr. Epstein’s day-to-day communications and showed influential people pressing him for insight into Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Epstein suggested he knew well. “i am the one able to take him down,” he wrote of Mr. Trump.
This trove of emails was separate from the Justice Department records that both critics and supporters of Mr. Trump had long demanded. Two days later, on Nov. 14, Mr. Trump called for investigations limited to Democrats mentioned in the emails, raising concerns that such probes could be used to justify withholding additional records.
Nov. 16: Near-unanimous approval
Pressure intensified in Congress as Mr. Trump’s supporters continued to call for transparency. Mr. Trump and Republican leaders had waged an all-out campaign to block a bipartisan effort, backed by several of Mr. Epstein’s victims, that would force a House vote directing the Justice Department to release all Epstein-related files.
Mr. Trump sent aides to warn Republicans that supporting the petition would be seen as a “hostile act” against the administration. He personally called defectors and summoned one high-profile Republican lawmaker to meet with Ms. Bondi and the F.B.I. director.
The efforts failed. In private conversations, Republicans warned Mr. Trump that voter pressure would leave them little choice but to support the release. Rather than risk a mass defection, Mr. Trump reversed course on Nov. 16, writing on social media that House Republicans should vote to release the files “because we have nothing to hide.”
Two days later, Congress overwhelmingly approved the bill.
Speaker Mike Johnson, who had fought for months to keep the bill off the House floor, including by refusing to swear in a Democratic representative-elect for more than seven weeks, said he ultimately felt he had to back it. “None of us want to go on record and in any way be accused of not being for maximum transparency,” he said.
The following day, President Trump signed the bill into law.
The Justice Department, rushing under pressure from Congress to comply with a law signed by President Trump last month, released more than 13,000 files on Friday arising from investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in jail in 2019 while under indictment on federal charges of sex trafficking minors.
The release of the files had been long awaited by those who believed the materials could shed light on Mr. Epstein’s activities and his ties to prominent and powerful men. The Justice Department said more documents would be released in the coming weeks.
Here are six takeaways about what the first batch of files divulged — and did not.
The documents produced no major revelations.
The released files, which included thousands of photographs and investigative documents, added little to the public’s understanding of Mr. Epstein’s conduct. The materials also did not provide much additional insight into Mr. Epstein’s connections to wealthy and powerful businessmen and politicians who associated with him.
The materials were mostly drawn from investigations into Mr. Epstein reaching back to an initial inquiry opened by the police in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2005. There were also files from a subsequent investigation conducted by federal prosecutors in Florida that ended in 2008 with a plea deal, and from a final inquiry by prosecutors in Manhattan in 2019 that was never resolved, after Mr. Epstein died in jail while the case was still proceeding.
Many of the documents, which included phone records, travel logs and what appeared to be case files with interviews featuring some of Mr. Epstein’s female victims, were heavily redacted. One of the redacted files, amounting to 119 pages and entitled “Grand Jury NY,” was entirely blacked out.
The reaction from the right was muted.
Mr. Trump’s right-wing supporters have traditionally been among the most ardent advocates for releasing the Epstein files. They have long been convinced that the documents would contain evidence that a cabal of prominent men — in their telling, mostly Democrats — had joined Mr. Epstein in abusing young women and covering up their crimes.
But those same supporters were largely silent as the files came out, perhaps in response to the dearth of new incriminating information. Mr. Trump on Friday conspicuously refrained from commenting on the release of the materials, even though the case has haunted him politically.
Whether those who have woven elaborate conspiracy theories around Mr. Epstein and the government’s handling of the investigation will be satisfied by anything the Justice Department releases seems open to question.
Bill Clinton was featured prominently.
Whether by design or chance, many of the photographs included in the files were of one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent political adversaries: former President Bill Clinton.
One image depicted Mr. Clinton reclining in a hot tub with a person whose face had been blacked out. In many of the photos of Mr. Clinton, he was only person whose identity could be discerned. The files provided little or no context for the pictures.
The photos of Mr. Clinton were made public after Mr. Trump ordered the Justice Department last month to investigate any ties between the former president and other Democrats to Mr. Epstein. Attorney General Pam Bondi immediately followed up on Mr. Trump’s instructions by directing Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to undertake the case.
The White House on Friday sought to make political hay of the release of the photos of Mr. Clinton.
“We did see something,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in a social media post on Friday above the image of Mr. Clinton in the hot tub. “Just not what you wanted.”
A spokesman for Mr. Clinton suggested that the White House had engineered the release of the photos to distract from Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Mr. Epstein.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” said the spokesman, Angel Urena. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever.”
There were few mentions of Trump.
For months, Mr. Trump actively fought the release of the Epstein files, calling them a Democratic “hoax” and threatening to punish members of Congress who voted to allow them to be made public.
But his name was mentioned rarely in the materials released on Friday. It remained unclear, though, whether he would figure more in the release of files still to come and whether the Justice Department selected the initial batch with politics in mind.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were close friends for years, and the president’s earlier reluctance to release the files prompted speculation about whether they prominently featured him.
Most of the photos of Mr. Trump released on Friday had already been made public, including images of him and his wife, Melania, with Mr. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a federal prison sentence for helping Mr. Epstein traffic underage women.
Written references to Mr. Trump came up in Mr. Epstein’s address book and flight logs, as well as a message book in which Mr. Epstein’s assistants let him know about missed phone calls. Versions of those documents were already public.
Mr. Trump’s name also comes up in interviews with Ms. Maxwell, transcripts that the Justice Department had previously made public and rereleased on Friday.
Epstein attracted the rich and famous.
The files showed how Mr. Epstein attracted a remarkably broad spectrum of famous people into his orbit, from the rock stars Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger to the legendary newsman Walter Cronkite.
While the materials bore no suggestion that these celebrities had any knowledge of or involvement in Mr. Epstein’s illicit activities, they stood nonetheless as a remarkable testament to his ability to attract attention from the rich and famous.
Still, the documents and photos were largely silent about a roster of other well-known people who have long been associated with Mr. Epstein and his finances, including businessmen like Leon Black and Leslie H. Wexner.
There’s more to come, eventually.
In an interview on Fox News on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, acknowledged that the Justice Department was not finished releasing files. Thousands more would be made public “in the coming weeks,” he said.
The delay meant that the Trump administration would apparently violate the law signed by the president in November ordering the complete release of all unclassified materials about Mr. Epstein in the Justice Department’s possession within 30 days, with limited exceptions.
Under the law, the administration can withhold records that identify victims or include images of child sexual abuse. The legislation also allows the Justice Department to withhold records if they are otherwise classified or would “jeopardize an active federal investigation.”
Several members of Congress quickly moved to criticize Mr. Blanche, saying that the department’s partial release of the Epstein files meant it had failed to meet its legal obligations.
Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who broke from Mr. Trump to push for the release of the files, voiced his discontent in a social media post, sharing a photo of the law in which he highlighted the language requiring the department to release “all” of its files by Friday.
“Time’s up. Release the files,” Mr. Massie wrote in a follow-up post.
Nicholas Confessore and Steve Eder contributed reporting.
Fitting a pattern of behavior from earlier this year, President Trump said nothing of the Epstein files in an hour-and-a-half long speech tonight in North Carolina. The president, who has sought to downplay his extensive ties to Jeffrey Epstein, often avoids discussing the topic and attacks the journalists who ask him about it.
Disappointed. Frustrated. Suspicious.
Several of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims said Friday that Justice Department failed them with its partial release of files related to the federal investigations into Mr. Epstein’s decades-long sexual abuse of teen girls and young women. They said the release of thousands of pages of photographs and heavily redacted documents did little to shed new light on the investigations and the scope of Mr. Epstein’s crimes or conspirators.
“They are proving everything we have been saying about corruption and delayed justice,” said Jess Michaels, one of the earliest known victims of Mr. Epstein. “What are they protecting? The coverup continues.”
Ms. Michaels has said she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Epstein in 1991 when she was 22 years old and training to be a dancer. She was among the victims who lobbied for the bipartisan law that directed the Justice Department to release virtually everything it had gathered during its sex trafficking investigations of Mr. Epstein and one of his main enablers, Ghislaine Maxwell.
But the more than 13,000 files released on Friday were heavily redacted and not easily searchable.
“If everything is redacted, where is the transparency?” said Marijke Chartouni, who has said she was sexually abused by Mr. Epstein when she was 20 years old.
Among the tens of thousands of pages was one document that did provide a long-sought window into the F.B.I.’s handling of Mr. Epstein’s case: The file showed that Maria Farmer, another of Mr. Epstein’s earliest victims, filed a federal “child pornography” complaint against him in 1996. But investigators did not begin to thoroughly scrutinize Mr. Epstein until about a decade later.
Ms. Farmer, who fought for years to get the F.B.I. to make public her complaint, said she felt “vindicated” to finally see the document but also was heartbroken at the knowledge that the F.B.I. did not act on her complaint.
“It’s a tremendous relief that she doesn’t have to continue to fight to prove her truth,” said Ms. Farmer’s sister, Annie Farmer. She noted, though, that she was disappointed by the general lack of transparency with Friday’s release.
“So many of the photos are irrelevant,” said Marina Larcerda, who has said Mr. Epstein sexually abused her when she was 14. She was an important witness in the 2019 federal investigation that led to the filing of sex trafficking charges against Mr. Epstein. But she only recently went public with her story.
“We have been let down,” Ms. Larcerda said. “We waited for this day to bring these other men who have been protected to justice.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, one of four Republicans who publicly broke with President Trump’s wishes to force a vote on the law to release the Epstein files, said she “couldn’t be more proud” of her efforts. In a social media post, she suggested she was vindicated by the release of a complaint that Maria Farmer, who once worked for Epstein, filed with the F.B.I. in 1996 about his interest in “child pornography.”
Right-wing Trump supporters have traditionally been among the most ardent voices calling for the release of the Epstein files, often surmising that the materials would expose a cabal of powerful deep-state figures. But at least so far tonight, the reaction on the right to the released files has been notably muted.
Reporting from Washington
Lawmakers from both parties on Friday accused the Justice Department of failing to comply with a law requiring the release of all of its material on Jeffrey Epstein, citing extensive redactions and the department’s acknowledgment that it had not finished reviewing or making public some files.
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky and one of the lawmakers who wrote the statute, said in a social media post that the release of the files “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California and the measure’s co-sponsor, said that he believed a number of documents were missing, particularly a “draft indictment” that he said implicated others who watched or participated in the “abuse of young girls.”
“It is an incomplete release, with too many redactions,” Mr. Khanna said, adding that he and Mr. Massie were weighing whether they might impeach officials, move to hold them in contempt of Congress or refer them for prosecution “for obstructing justice.”
Under the law, which Congress passed and President Trump signed last month, the Justice Department was required to release all of its investigative material on Mr. Epstein by Friday, though it was allowed to redact and withhold certain material.
But in a letter to Congress sent before the release, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, acknowledged that the department was not done reviewing or redacting files.
“I anticipate this ongoing review being completed over the next two weeks,” Mr. Blanche said in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
Representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrats on the Oversight and Judiciary committees, said in a statement that they were “examining all legal options in the face of this violation of federal law.”
Except for Mr. Massie, congressional Republicans were largely silent after the release of the files on Friday night. But Democrats were critical of the administration’s handling of the documents, particularly a 119-page file entitled “Grand Jury NY” that was entirely redacted.
“Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said in a statement.
Under the law, the Justice Department is required to send a report to the House and Senate judiciary committees detailing the records it withheld, a list of all “government officials and politically exposed persons” mentioned in the Epstein files and the legal reasoning behind redactions.
That report is due within 15 days after the release of the files.
In a letter to the judges overseeing the Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases, Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said there were challenges and tensions in the redaction process of the documents released on Friday and that any such review “of this size and scope is vulnerable to machine error, instances of human error,” insufficient information about a victim and the possibility the media or others will piece together information to identify a victim.
In his letter, Clayton said victim privacy interests counseled in favor of “redacting the faces of women in photographs with Epstein even where not all the women are known to be victims” because he said it was not practical for the Justice Department to identify every person in a photo. “This approach to photographs could be viewed by some as an over-redaction,” Clayton added, “but the Department believes it should, in the compressed time frame, err on the side of redacting to protect victims.”
Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has filed a sworn declaration with the federal judges overseeing the Epstein and Maxwell cases who had ordered the release of the grand jury and other investigative records with redactions to protect victim privacy. He confirmed his office “rigorously reviewed” the released materials after the process was completed, and found none contain “personally identifiable information” of victims or other information that would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
A woman who once worked for Jeffrey Epstein filed a complaint to the F.B.I. about his interest in “child pornography” in 1996, about a decade before investigators began scrutinizing his predatory behavior.
The woman, Maria Farmer, has for years said that she had called federal investigators in the summer of 1996, but the F.B.I. had never publicly acknowledged her original report, even to Ms. Farmer. Some people following the Epstein case had accused her of inventing the story. After the release of thousands of Epstein files on Friday, The New York Times contacted Ms. Farmer about a report stamped with the date of Sept. 3, 1996. She broke down in tears.
President Trump’s name is rarely mentioned in the batch of Jeffrey Epstein files that his Justice Department released on Friday, based on a preliminary New York Times scan of thousands of documents and hundreds of photographs.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were close friends for years, The Times has reported, and Mr. Trump’s initial refusal to release federal files related to investigations into Mr. Epstein sparked speculation about whether those files featured Mr. Trump. His allies have previously confirmed that his name appears in the files about Mr. Epstein.
The files that The Times initially reviewed on Friday were heavily redacted. Those that were visible included scattered references to or images of Mr. Trump. Most of the photos were already public, including shots of him and Melania Trump with Mr. Epstein and Mr. Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Written references to Mr. Trump came up in Mr. Epstein’s address book and flight logs, as well as a message book in which Mr. Epstein’s assistants let him know about missed phone calls. Versions of those documents were already public.
Mr. Trump’s name also comes up in interviews with Ms. Maxwell, transcripts that the Justice Department had previously made public and rereleased on Friday.
In a 2016 deposition, Alan Dershowitz, who served as one of Mr. Epstein’s criminal defense lawyers, said that he had seen Mr. Trump at Mr. Epstein’s home. He didn’t provide specifics.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly downplayed his relationship with Mr. Epstein, including by saying that he cut ties with Mr. Epstein in the early 2000s after Mr. Epstein recruited one of his employees from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The scarce mentions of Mr. Trump are in stark contrast to references to former President Bill Clinton. The Justice Department released dozens of photos of Mr. Clinton in various settings, including one of him in a hot tub.
Todd Blanche, a top Justice Department official, said on Friday that the administration would continue to release a large volume of Epstein documents in the weeks ahead after those files had been reviewed to redact references to possible victims of Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender.
The first tranche of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into Jeffrey Epstein appeared to focus significantly on material connected to former President Bill Clinton, at a moment when Republicans have fought to shift public attention away from Mr. Epstein’s friendship with President Trump.
The dozens of photos released on Friday include one of Mr. Clinton in a hot tub and another showing Mr. Clinton swimming in a pool with Ghislaine Maxwell, who conspired with Mr. Epstein to operate his sex trafficking operation, along with a second woman. Another shows a woman seated closely with Mr. Clinton on what appears to be an airplane. There is also what appears to be a candid shot of Mr. Clinton speaking with Mr. Epstein and pictures of him with the musician Mick Jagger.
The images and documents have been released without context or background information. It is unclear which photographs might have been taken by Mr. Epstein and which might have been sent to or acquired by him, or where many of them were taken. Justice Department officials have not said how they selected the particular tranche of documents that were released on Friday.
Mr. Clinton is one of the few people whose faces were not redacted, along with Mr. Epstein himself and Ms. Maxwell. In posts on X after the release, a White House spokeswoman repeatedly pointed out photos of Mr. Clinton and argued that the news media did not want to focus on the images.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has worked to deflect public scrutiny of his own close friendship with Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, ordering his appointees in to begin an investigation into Mr. Clinton and other prominent Democrats who were associated with him. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are also seeking to force Mr. Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to give in-person depositions in their own investigation. On social media, Mr. Trump has claimed without evidence that Mr. Clinton and other Democrats spent “spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island.’”
But Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, has contradicted those assertions. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Ms. Wiles said that Mr. Trump was not telling the truth in accusing Mr. Clinton of visiting the private island. Ms. Maxwell, in her interview this summer with Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, also undercut Mr. Trump’s efforts to blame Mr. Clinton. In the wide-ranging interview, Ms. Maxwell said Mr. Clinton was her friend, not Mr. Epstein’s.
Angel Urena, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, accused Mr. Trump’s White House of using the release to shield themselves from real scrutiny. “They can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton,” he said, adding that even Ms. Wiles said Mr. Trump “was wrong about Bill Clinton.”
Mr. Urena went on to say that there were two kinds of people highlighted in the documents: “The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light. The second group continued relationships with him after. We’re in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that.”
None of Mr. Epstein’s victims have made any public allegations of wrongdoing against Mr. Clinton.
Mr. Clinton’s ties to Mr. Epstein are relatively well known. The former president took four international trips with Mr. Epstein on the financier’s private jet in 2002 and 2003, including a humanitarian trip to Africa that brought Mr. Epstein his first significant publicity. Roughly 80 photos in one document are marked “Clinton, Africa, London,” and appear to include shots taken during the humanitarian trip, when Mr. Clinton’s entourage included the actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker.
Mr. Clinton also flew on Mr. Epstein’s private plane in February 2002, from Miami to Westchester County, N.Y., and in March 2002, from New York City to London, according to flight manifests released by the Justice Department on Friday.
But Mr. Clinton has said he did not visit Little St. James, the island that Mr. Epstein owned and where many of his abuses are alleged to have occurred.
Mr. Clinton visited Mr. Epstein’s New York apartment once around 2002, according to his representatives, but he has said he never visited Mr. Epstein’s palatial residence in Palm Beach, Fla. or the financier’s ranch in New Mexico.
In 1993, after Mr. Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd president, Mr. Epstein visited the White House in February, the first of many trips to the Clinton White House. He also became a donor, giving $10,000 to help refurbish the White House.
By 1995, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Epstein were friendly enough for Mr. Clinton to write a get-well note to Mr. Epstein’s mother who was sick. “Hang in there,” Mr. Clinton scrawled on a yellow Post-it, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Epstein saved the note.
One of the redacted files, containing 119 pages and entitled “Grand Jury NY,” is entirely blacked out. The Justice Department went into federal court twice in Manhattan seeking the release of grand jury materials arising from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Even though a judge agreed to the department’s second request, it appears as if the grand jury materials remain shielded from the public.
Almost two hours after the Justice Department made public thousands of documents from its Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump has not yet commented on their release. The case has long haunted him politically.
The files contain a set of phone message notes written years ago for Jeffrey Epstein. One message, dated Nov. 8, 2004, from a caller whose name was redacted, said: “I have a Female for him.” The following January, he got another message with identical wording: “I have a female for him.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called for more information on the redactions in the files released by the Justice Department today.
“Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law,” he said in a statement. “For example, all 119 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why.”
The law that required the release of the files allowed the Justice Department to redact some information. The department is required to file a report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees in 15 days that details the legal basis for the redactions that it made.
President Trump has appeared in this initial tranche of documents only a handful of times, according to a preliminary New York Times scan of the material. One image, for instance, appears to show an array of photos in which he is posing with women.
A large portion of the investigative files are redacted, including what appear to be case files connected to Jeffrey Epstein’s multiple female victims. At least so far, the unredacted materials have not disclosed any major new revelations.
The trove of documents also contained a large number of undated, mostly uncaptioned photographs of Epstein with celebrities, including Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger. There are also several photos of former President Bill Clinton, including one that shows him reclining in a hot tub with a person whose face has been blacked out.
White House correspondent
President Trump often generates multiple news cycles per day. White House officials believe that when the news is focused on immigration, crime or the president’s peacemaking efforts abroad, Mr. Trump is winning. As such, if Mr. Trump doesn’t like one news cycle, he can fire off an all-caps Truth Social post and create another.
But the Epstein files — which carry with them a constant reminder of the president’s long friendship with a sex offender — have dogged him in a way few other issues have. Nothing Mr. Trump has tried to do to get them out of the news has worked.
Mr. Trump has sought to distract from the files, complaining that the public should focus instead on his administration’s successes. He issued threats, ordering Republicans to stop talking about them, and enlisted his closest aides to bully once-compliant lawmakers who joined the effort to get the files released. He even accused one of his biggest supporters of being a “traitor.”
But it was only when it became clear that he was going to lose the vote to release the files in the House that he relented, reluctantly embracing the legislation even as he continued to dismiss it as nothing more than a “hoax.”
Mr. Trump has denied any involvement in or knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. But this spring, his own attorney general, Pam Bondi, told him that his name appeared in them.
A preliminary review by New York Times reporters of the thousands of Jeffrey Epstein documents released this afternoon by the Justice Department suggests that much of the materials derive from three investigations into his interactions with young women: an initial inquiry opened by the police in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2005; a subsequent investigation conducted by federal prosecutors in Florida that ended in 2008 with a plea deal for Epstein; and a final inquiry by prosecutors in Manhattan in 2019 that was never resolved because he died in prison while the case was proceeding.
Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify before Congress and explain why the Justice Department was not prepared to release all of its files by Friday, the deadline set by a law passed by Congress in November and signed by President Trump.
“They promised to release the files. They haven’t done it,” Schiff, a member of the Judiciary committee, said in a television interview. “They could have been completely ready for this moment, and they’re not, or they’re just simply willfully withholding the materials.”
Jeffrey Epstein paid teenage girls money to perform sex acts and used his onetime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell to recruit and manage his stable of victims.
An F.B.I. and Florida police investigation led to his indictment in 2006. Two years later he pleaded guilty in state court to two felony charges, including soliciting a minor, in a deal that avoided federal charges that could have meant far more serious prison time.
A series of articles years later by The Miami Herald revealed how the criminal justice system had catered to Mr. Epstein, despite the reams of evidence against him.
In 2019, he was arrested by federal agents in the New York area, accused of trafficking dozens of girls, some as young as 14, and engaging in sex acts with them. The authorities say he hanged himself in a jail cell while awaiting trial.
Ms. Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2021 of conspiring with Mr. Epstein for nearly a decade to aid his abuse.
The very nature of the charges against Mr. Epstein contributed to some of the confusion about what he did. By calling him a sex trafficker, federal officials left many with the impression that Mr. Epstein was selling children to others to be abused, but that was never part of the criminal charges against him.
In his letter to members of Congress, which was viewed by The New York Times, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said that the material released on Friday included portions of the F.B.I.’s investigative files for its 2006 and 2018 cases against Epstein; its 2019 criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell; grand-jury materials from all three cases; and material from the F.B.I.’s investigation into Epstein’s death in federal prison in 2019.
Blanche said that the department had more than 200 attorneys reviewing material to determine what the Justice Department could release to the public.
Representative Ro Khanna, who helped lead the campaign in Congress to force Friday’s release of files, said that if Department of Justice officials do not adequately demonstrate that they are complying with the law requiring the release of the documents, Congress could hold impeachment hearings for Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, “if it comes to that.”
The trove of released materials contain hundreds of photographs collected during the Epstein investigations. A team of New York Times reporters is currently going through them. Former President Bill Clinton appears in many of them but it is difficult to assess the context. Other photographs show the pop star Michael Jackson.
There is also a large trove of investigative files arising from various inquiries into Epstein. Some of those files appear to be related to interviews with some of Epstein’s victims, but a large portion of the files are redacted, hiding the substantive information contained in them.
In a letter to members of Congress, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said that the Justice Department had identified 1,200 names of victims of Jeffrey Epstein or relatives of victims, and that it had redacted or withheld any materials that could reveal their identities.
In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Blanche also wrote that “the volume of materials to be reviewed” would lead to the release of more documents. He suggested that the process would be done before the year ends, writing that the Justice Department “will inform Congress when that review and production are complete by the end of this year.”
Representitive Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said that he believes that the Department of Justice is trying to comply with the law requiring the release of the trove of documents. But he urged Department of Justice officials to explain why they were not able to release all of the documents, and to explain “each redaction.”
Khanna, who spoke to reporters on a video call as the documents were released, said that “all options are on the table,” as members of Congress and survivors’ lawyers comb through the release. “I don’t know whether there’s new information or whether it’s stonewalling,” he said.
On first review, many of the files appear heavily redacted. The law mandating the release of the files, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, required the Justice Department to redact information that identified potential victims of Epstein or contained child sexual-abuse material.
It also allowed the Justice Department to withhold material involved in continuing investigations. Federal officials will legally need to submit a report to Congress providing details on this material, but they will not have to do so for at least two weeks.
The Justice Department’s website also contains a search function, though it is unclear if it’s working properly. A query for “Epstein” returned no results.
It will take time to go through these files, and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, suggested that the documents here were not the full release, making it difficult to know what material has been withheld.
Covering Congress
The Justice Department on Friday released a set of publicly downloadable files in response to a law passed by Congress. You can see and search them at this link on the department’s website.
On a site that it calls an “Epstein Library,” the files are sorted into multiple categories:
Court records from criminal and civil cases;
Disclosures the Justice Department said it made to comply with a law passed by Congress and signed by President Trump in November;
Material it has released in response to public records requests;
A batch of files it released in September to the House Oversight Committee, much of which contained material that was already public.
The Justice Department warned that some of the library’s contents include descriptions of sexual assault, advising that portions of the database may not be appropriate for all readers.
A group of Times reporters and editors with deep experience covering the Jeffrey Epstein case are examining the documents released by the Justice Department on Friday. But they will proceed with typical care to ensure accuracy and fairness.
Several of these staff members have covered the case since 2019. Others report on the Justice Department, Congress, the White House and the federal court system.
The public release was mandated by Congress in November. Though Republicans worked to stop the legislation, it passed nearly unanimously in the House and Senate and was signed by President Trump. That signature started a 30-day clock to release the files Friday.
The legislation contains significant exceptions, allowing the Justice Department to keep many documents confidential. The department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche, said Friday that “several hundred thousand” pages of materials would not be released by the deadline set by Congress.
Here’s more coverage:
An exploration of the Trump-Epstein friendship.
A look at the diary of a Jeffrey Epstein girlfriend.
About Mr. Epstein’s death in jail, which was ruled a suicide.
On a site that it calls a “full Epstein library,” the Justice Department has sorted files into multiple categories: court records from criminal and civil cases; disclosures it said it made because of the law passed by Congress and signed by President Trump in November; material it has released in response to public records requests; and the batch of files it released in September to the House Oversight Committee, much of which contained material that was already public.
The Justice Department has just released a set of publicly downloadable files in response to a law passed by Congress.
More than six years after his death, Jeffrey Epstein has become an American obsession. The public fascination only intensified after President Trump initially refused this year to release federal investigative records about the infamous sex offender — before reversing himself under pressure.
Much of the last quarter-century of Mr. Epstein’s life has been carefully examined — including how, in the 1990s and early 2000s, he amassed hundreds of millions of dollars through his work for the retail tycoon Leslie Wexner. Yet the public understanding of Epstein’s early ascent has been shrouded in mystery. How did a college dropout from Brooklyn claw his way to the pinnacle of American finance, politics and society? How did Epstein go from nearly being fired at the investment firm Bear Stearns to managing the wealth of billionaires? What were the origins of his own fortune?
A team of New York Times reporters spent months trying to pierce this veil. They interviewed dozens of Epstein’s former colleagues, friends, girlfriends, business partners and financial victims; sifted through private archives and tracked down previously unpublished recordings and transcripts of old interviews; perused diaries, letters, emails and photo albums, including some that belonged to Epstein; and reviewed thousands of pages of court and government records.
What emerged is the fullest portrait to date of one of the world’s most notorious criminals — a narrative that differs in important respects from previously published accounts of Epstein’s rise, and revealed how, again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.
The Justice Department will not release all of its files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison, by its congressionally mandated deadline of Friday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said.
Appearing on Fox News, Mr. Blanche, the department’s No. 2 official, said that while the Trump administration would release “several hundred thousand documents” related to Mr. Epstein by Friday, officials would make public “several hundred thousand more” in the coming weeks.
“There’s a lot of eyes looking at these, and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing,” Mr. Blanche added, “that we are protecting every single victim.”
The delay meant that the administration would apparently violate a law signed by President Trump in November ordering the complete release of all unclassified materials about Mr. Epstein in the Justice Department’s possession within 30 days, with limited exceptions.
Under the law, the administration may withhold records that identify victims, that include images of child sexual abuse, or are otherwise classified. The legislation also allows the Justice Department to withhold records if they would “jeopardize an active federal investigation.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered federal prosecutors in Manhattan to investigate ties between Mr. Epstein and prominent Democrats shortly after Mr. Trump directed her to do so last month.
Mr. Blanche, in his interview, said he was aware of the 30-day window, adding that department officials had been “working tirelessly” to review and make public “every single document that we have within the Department of Justice.”
Several members of Congress quickly moved to criticize Mr. Blanche, saying that the department’s partial release of the Epstein files meant it failed to meet its legal obligations.
Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who broke from Mr. Trump to push for the release of the files, voiced his discontent in a social media post, sharing a photo of the law in which he highlighted the language requiring the department to release “all” of its files by Friday.
“Time’s up. Release the files,” Mr. Massie wrote in a follow-up post.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, accused the White House of breaking the law and assailed Mr. Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi as being “hellbent on hiding the truth.”
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California and one of the lawmakers who introduced the Epstein files law, criticized the Trump administration as well, saying it had ample time to prepare for the full release. But Mr. Khanna said that if the Justice Department clarified its timeline to release the rest of the material, it would be “a positive step.”
More on the Jeffrey Epstein Case
Andrew Farkas: The New York City real estate mogul had assured investors that his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was for business only. But in emails obtained by The New York Times, Farkas told Epstein that he considered him one of his best friends.
Pushing Republicans on Epstein: The top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Representative Robert Garcia, has brought aggressive tactics and reality-show flair to investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to President Trump.
Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein's co-conspirator asked a federal judge to set aside her December 2021 sex-abuse conviction, claiming that a series of constitutional violations had denied her a fair trial.
Larry Summers Video: Harvard officials have opened a secret disciplinary investigation into at least two students for their roles in drawing scrutiny to the relationship between Epstein and the school’s former president, Larry Summers.
Clintons’ Fight to Avoid Testifying: Bill and Hillary Clinton have repeatedly offered to provide sworn statements, but Representative James Comer has threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress if they fail to appear.
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