Months before the Trump administration abruptly announced it would release no further Jeffrey Epstein records, someone inside the Justice Department or FBI simply marked 16 documents from the case with the designation "POTUS."
The detail comes from a spreadsheet titled "DOJ Document Flag List," dated March 25, 2025, among newly released FBI FOIA documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.
The inventory catalogs records from the FBI Miami field office's original 2006 investigation into Epstein, and includes a page labeled "FLAGGED Items List, per case, per DOJ guidance."
Most entries carry conventional justifications, files were held back for containing "classified information," "foreign government information," or the identities of victims and "potential public figures."
But 16 entries list only "POTUS" as the reason for the flag, covering an eclectic mix of material – magazine and newspaper articles, message pads, phone message books, and at least one unidentified record.
Some of the Epstein records singled out by the DOJ have since been released, but Bloomberg reported the inventory offers a rough explanation for why they had been flagged for additional scrutiny.
Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI has explained what "POTUS" signifies as a flagging category. The DOJ referred inquiries about the list to the FBI, which then declined to comment.
FBI Director Kash Patel had ordered roughly 1,000 special agents to a bureau facility in Winchester, Virginia, to work alongside FOIA staff on what was branded the "Epstein Transparency Project," preparing documents for public release. Yet in July 2025, after months of that effort, the administration reversed course entirely, announcing there would be no further disclosures.
Internal emails obtained through a FOIA release show internal friction over how to explain that reversal.
When a draft joint DOJ-FBI statement circulated in June 2025, then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino objected: "This is absolutely not an accurate representation of our transparency efforts on the Epstein case," he wrote to Patel, who agreed that revisions were needed.
Two days later, a new draft won Bongino's approval as better reflecting the bureau's "aggressive transparency efforts." The DOJ ultimately released a statement on July 6, 2025, declaring that "no further disclosure" of the Epstein files would be "appropriate or warranted," a description Bongino's own emails suggest even he initially found misleading.
Public backlash helped drive the eventual passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed into law in November 2025, compelling the DOJ to release 3.5 million pages of records. Still, roughly 2.5 million pages remain unreleased, and the specific rationale behind the "POTUS" designation on those 16 records has never been publicly detailed.
Whether the flag refers to material mentioning the president, material of interest to the president, or something else entirely remains unknown.
What's clear is that the designation existed on paper months before officials tried, and ultimately failed, to keep the broader Epstein file from becoming public at all.
