The Trump administration admitted to a court that the Justice Department had to remove thousands of files from the latest Epstein release because they hadn't been properly redacted to remove private, identifying information about some of the victims.
The revelation came in a filing on Monday with federal judges in New York, related to a review of the criminal cases against the late accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Last week, MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin first reported that the latest trove of Epstein files were full of such compromising information — an issue that raised further questions about just what the Justice Department was doing for weeks as they blew past the legal deadline to release the remaining files, as redaction review had been their main explanation for why it was taking so long.
In the new filing, DOJ officials attempted to explain themselves.
"The Department has worked all hours through the weekend from the point when the first victim-related concerns were raised," said the filing. "To that end, out of the larger production described above, the Department now has taken down several thousands of documents and media that may have inadvertently included victim-identifying information due to various factors, including technical or human error. As of the date of this letter, the Department now has taken down nearly all of those materials specifically identified by victims or their counsel, as well a substantial number of documents identified independently by the Department. The Department is reviewing those documents and will re-process them."
"As part of this procedure, for reasons related to the operation of the document management system, the Department must periodically 're-index' the data contained on the Epstein Library website to ensure that, although a document has been reviewed and redacted for reposting, the underlying metadata that permits the search functionality of the database also is cleansed of the relevant information related to the document," the filing continued. "This process and the additional searches are substantially complete but remain ongoing."
All of this comes at the same time as President Donald Trump himself threatens to sue over how his own appearances in the Epstein files have been characterized.
