Journalism of Courage
The US Justice Department is set release several hundred thousand documents from its files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, December 19, the legally mandated deadline to do so.
The Justice Department hasn’t said when during the day it intends to make the records public.
The total volume is also unclear, though Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Fox News interview that he expected the department to release “several hundred thousand” records on Friday and then several hundred thousand more in the coming weeks.
“I expect that we’re going to release several hundred thousand documents today, and those documents will come in all different forms — photographs and other materials associated with all of the investigations into Mr. Epstein,” Blanche told Fox News.
“I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks,” he said. “So today, several hundred thousand, and then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.”
The records could contain the most detailed look yet at nearly two decades’ worth of government investigations into Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women and underage girls.
Their release has long been demanded by a public hungry to learn whether any of Epstein’s rich and powerful associates knew about — or participated in — the abuse. Epstein’s accusers have also long sought answers about why federal authorities shut down their initial investigation into the allegations in 2008.
On November 19, Trump signed a bill giving the Justice Department 30 days to release most of its files and communications related to Epstein, including information about the investigation into his death in a federal jail.
It allows for redactions about the victims or ongoing investigations but makes clear no records shall be withheld or redacted due to “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”
Police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein in 2005 after the family of a 14-year-old girl reported she had been molested at his mansion. The FBI joined the investigation, and authorities gathered testimony from multiple underage girls who said they had been hired to give Epstein sexual massages.
Ultimately, though, prosecutors gave Epstein a deal that allowed him to avoid federal prosecution. He pleaded guilty to state prostitution charges involving someone under age 18 and was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
Epstein’s accusers then spent years in civil litigation trying to get that plea deal set aside. One of those women, Virginia Giuffre, accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters, starting at age 17, with numerous other men, including billionaires, famous academics, US politicians and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, then known as Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Federal prosecutors in New York brought new sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019, but he killed himself in jail a month after his arrest. Prosecutors then charged Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, with recruiting underage girls for Epstein to abuse.
Maxwell was convicted in late 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence, though she was moved from a low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas after she was interviewed over the summer by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Her lawyers argued that she never should have been tried or convicted. The Justice Department in July said it had not found any information that could support prosecuting anyone else.
