The United States Department of Justice met this Friday, the last day of the deadline given by law to it by Congress in Washington, with the obligation to publish Jeffrey Epstein’s papers. They were released on a website created expressly a huge amount of information – hundreds of thousands of documents, many of them severely censored –, But, as the Department of Justice itself admitted, they did not release all of the information in their possession, despite the fact that the rule that required them to do so, which President Donald Trump reluctantly signed, specifies that obligation.
The papers came to light around 4:00 p.m. and were divided into categories – judicial documents from criminal and civil cases; information related to the transparency law; files that he delivered in September to the House of Representatives Oversight Committee…−. Just by reading the list it was clear that there was an abundance of already known materials.
Until a careful study of these hundreds of thousands of documents is carried out, it will not be possible to know what the main revelations they contain, much less what remains to be revealed.
Attorney General Pam Bondi had 30 days to release the files of the millionaire pedophile, who died in 2019 in a Manhattan cell (he committed suicide, as certified by the coroner) while waiting to be tried as the ringleader of a child sex trafficking ring involving hundreds at the time of their rape.
Hours before the declassification, Deputy Prosecutor Todd Blanche already warned in an interview that not all the material would come out. To justify it, the Department of Justice uses the protection of the victims and the names of the innocent people named in the papers. Blanche also said that new paper releases could be expected in “the next two weeks.”
In a letter to Congress obtained by Fox News and sent this Friday, Blanche speaks of “more than 1,200 names of victims or their relatives” whose names have been blacked out. “We have also removed and will not disclose any material that could allow your identification,” he adds.
The prospect of not knowing the whole truth at once was a (another) disappointment for the survivors of those abuses, for the politicians of both parties who have fought to shed light on the case, and for the American public.
She has been intrigued for years by what was happening behind closed doors in the circles of power in which the financier moved, and in which he rubbed shoulders with presidents (Donald Trump), former presidents (Bill Clinton), high-profile political figures (Lawrence Summers), philanthropists (Bill Gates), extreme right-wing personalities (Steve Bannon), academics (Noam Chomsky), members of British royalty (Prince Andrew) and filmmakers (Woody Allen).
It is a sinister soap opera whose end has been delayed for years, which has generated all kinds of conspiracy theories in its wake. And also tarnishing reputations: appearing in the roles of Epstein, an extraordinarily well-connected man in fields such as finance or politics, does not automatically mean being guilty of any crime. Nor having been aware of Epstein’s crimes.
That that end did not come this Friday could not have been a surprise to anyone. The Trump Administration spent months promising to shed light on the millionaire pedophile’s roles, only to change its mind last July. Since then, some of its most prominent members, with Bondi at the helm, have hatched all kinds of tricks to not fulfill their promises, and that has caused Trump a crisis among his base of followers of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, many of whom are fans of conspiracy.
All members of both chambers except one, a Republican, approved the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Capitol Hill, a rule that twisted the arm of the Trump Administration after those months of resistance. It was assumed that the name of the president of the United States, who signed that law, would appear in the new documents, because he has been a constant presence in the different declassifications that have occurred over time, thanks to the efforts of the victims or the members of the Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives, which has released materials in recent months. The last batch arrived this Thursday.
The president of the United States was friends with the pedophile financier for about 15 years. before Epstein was prosecuted for the first time in Florida and emerged practically unscathed, despite dozens of testimonies from minors whom he recruited with the claim of acting as masseuses in exchange for money and who were treated by the prosecution as prostitutes. The end of the relationship between the two friends also came long before the real estate magnate and reality television star decided to dedicate himself to politics and ended up in the White House.
In addition to giving that 30-day period, the three-page law requires that the published material be easily downloadable, and that it allows searches, although this functionality did not work on the Department of Justice website published this Friday. The rule also authorizes the censorship of any information that may be compromising for victims, as well as materials with descriptions of sexual abuse of minors, shocking images or data that may endanger an active investigation or a judicial process in progress. Bondi is also required to justify these censorships and Congress is required to draft an additional report detailing the content. crossed out in a This will therefore expire at the beginning of January, in the case of newly published documents.
Blanche — who has had a prominent role in recent months after meeting for nine hours, on two separate days, Epstein’s getter who was later transferred to a minimum security prison in Texas — had already warned in a Fox News interview broadcast in the morning that not all the papers would be known this Friday.
“To be clear: Trump has said for years that he wants complete transparency,” he warned. “Now, the most important thing that the attorney general and the director have talked about [del FBI Kash] Patel is that we must protect the victims. “We are reviewing every document that we are going to release to make sure that each victim, their name, their identity and their story, to the extent that they need to be protected, are fully protected.”
The Department of Justice had declared in the previous weeks that to comply with its obligation it planned to disseminate 18 categories of materials from the different processes of the tangled Epstein (and Maxwell) case. Also, that would include search warrants, financial entries, notes from interviews with the
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