Lawyer calls DOJ out on major Epstein contradiction that hasn’t ‘gotten enough attention’

Ankush Khardori, lawyer and senior writer for Politico, called out the Justice Department Saturday for a major contradiction regarding Jeffrey Epstein, and one that he said hadn’t “gotten enough attention.”

While the DOJ is now releasing its Epstein files in a phased rollout – which it’s compelled to by law – last summer, the agency attempted to shut down further investigations into the disgraced financier, claiming to have reviewed all related files, according to a DOJ memo that leaked in June.

And then, on Christmas Eve, the DOJ announced that it had uncovered “a million more documents” related to Epstein, and would therefore need more time to properly redact and review the files before releasing them.

Appearing on CNN Saturday, Khardori was asked how it was possible for the DOJ to “just find a million new documents.”

“This is an excellent question,” Khardori said. “It's particularly a good question, I think, for a reason I don't think has gotten enough attention, because the Trump Justice Department claimed that they reviewed all the documents before they issued a joint memo saying that there was nothing further to investigate, that they've run over the prior investigation.”

The new documents, the DOJ claimed, were delivered to the agency from the Southern District of New York, the same district where Epstein-associate Ghislaine Maxwell was prosecuted and convicted of sex trafficking. As to how the DOJ could overlook such a large trove of documents, Khardori said that only one reasonable explanation existed: “incompetence.”

“In terms of how they find a million documents, I've never seen this happen before, [and] I can tell you as someone who represented corporations once in response to Justice Department criminal investigations and had to facilitate the production of documents,” Khardori said.

“If a corporate defendant waited until the last day to respond to a subpoena, said that they were doing rolling productions, and then told the government a week later that they had a million documents they had missed, the Justice Department would go ballistic. This is a total professionally incompetent endeavor [that] reflects very poorly on the [Pam] Bondi and [Todd] Blanche Justice Department.”