DOJ caught redacting files on Epstein company that moved millions after his death
The Justice Department quietly wiped bank fraud alerts from its Epstein files about a Jeffrey Epstein-owned company that kept moving millions after his death, a new report shows.
The alerts are called Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs — filings banks send to the government when they spot suspicious transactions.
TD Bank and Charles Schwab filed them on Southern Country International, an offshore bank Epstein owned in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a Miami Herald investigation reveals.
The SARs were briefly posted as part of the Epstein Files, then pulled and re-released completely blank, CBS News and the Herald both reported. The Justice Department has not responded to questions about why.
According to the Herald, Southern Country sat dormant for years, employing no one.
In the months before Jeffrey Epstein's July 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, more than $20 million suddenly flowed through it.
After Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10, another $25 million moved through Southern Country, with roughly a quarter coming from unknown sources, the Herald reported. The company was said to have no employees.
According to the Herald, TD Bank reviewed the accounts a month after his death and flagged the activity to the Treasury Department.
"A majority of the affected accounts were opened in 2019, and the subsequent funding of those accounts appears to have been conducted in a willfully deceitful manner intended to disguise the sources of funds as originating with Jeffrey Epstein," TD Bank wrote.
The Herald also reported that federal and Virgin Islands investigators opened a wire fraud probe in 2020 into a $15 million wire sent to Southern Country from a Jeffrey Epstein account at Deutsche Bank. It arrived the day after Epstein died. That probe was quietly closed four years later, an FBI memo shows, with no stated findings and no stated reason.
The redacted SARs are part of a broader pattern of the DOJ shielding financial records tied to Epstein. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) last year demanded records from major banks on more than $1.5 billion in suspicious Epstein transactions — and critics say the DOJ has protected potential associates while exposing victims.
"The DOJ seems to have made no 'errors' in redacting the names of potential associates and potential abusers in the files," one survivor's attorney told MS NOW.
"We took great pains… to make sure that we protected victims," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as one of President Donald Trump's personal lawyers, told ABC News.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia ruled last month that Blanche "has conceded that he is in violation" of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law Trump signed in November 2025, which requires the DOJ to release its Epstein records.
Responding to a July 2 deadline, Blanche told the court the redactions were legally justified and asked Sullivan for a 60-day extension — declining to release the documents.