Attorney General Todd Blanche's new word for handwritten notes on an accuser of President Donald Trump in the Epstein files is raising red flags.
Lawyer and journalist Katie Phang, a former prosecutor suing Blanche for the unredacted Epstein files, picked apart the Justice Department's latest court filing in a video posted Tuesday on her YouTube channel, "Katie Phang News."
At issue are handwritten notes from four FBI interviews with a woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted and physically abused her when she was between 13 and 15 years old. Trump has long denied wrongdoing tied to Epstein.
Blanche initially refused to release the notes in any form, arguing they were "substantially similar" to the typed FD-302 reports the FBI produced from those interviews. Then at an August hearing, DOJ attorney Andrew Block told U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan the notes were "duplicative."
"You and I don't have to go to law school, and you don't really need a lot of information to be able to glean that there is a material substantive difference between something that is substantially similar and something that is duplicative," Phang said.
"There is no way that those 302s were literally word by word the same d— thing as the handwritten FBI notes," she noted.
Sullivan ordered Blanche on September 16 to hand over the underlying notes for private review in both redacted and unredacted versions by 11 a.m. on September 24. In a notice of compliance filed Monday at Sullivan's direction, Blanche said the documents were hand-delivered to chambers 17 minutes before that deadline.
"Talk about a last-minute litigant," Phang said.
But Phang noted the filing describes handing over unredacted copies of the handwritten notes and never mentions the redacted versions Sullivan also required.
"So, is he in compliance? Doesn't seem like it to me," she said.
Phang argued Sullivan needed proposed redactions alongside the full notes to judge whether any withholding was justified. Without them, she predicted, the DOJ will object to any release on the grounds it hasn't had a chance to redact.
"Do you see it's a game?" Phang said. "It's a game that Todd Blanche is playing, and he's yanking a lot of chains, isn't he?"
She also noted the Epstein Files Transparency Act lists specific grounds for withholding records, and duplication isn't one of them.
"Even if they are duplicative, that doesn't bar the release of the handwritten notes," Phang said.
Phang said her legal team plans to respond. "Going to keep my foot on his throat and on the throat of the DOJ," she said.