The Justice Department said it has now conducted a page-by-page review of “millions” of pages of documents from its files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and said it will finish checking and posting the documents it can “in the near term.”
But officials declined to give themselves a firm deadline, citing the need to check with Epstein victims before posting identifying information.
The department is already a month overdue on a deadline set by Congress and President Trump to process and release the documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
That delay has sparked intense criticism of President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi, particularly from Democrats who speculate about a cover-up.
But Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, whom a judge personally charged with overseeing the protection of victims, said the process is much more difficult than the law’s timeline envisioned.
“Compliance with the act is a substantial undertaking, principally because of the size and varying types of materials and because, for a substantial number of those materials, the capabilities of the document management systems are not in themselves sufficient to ensure victim identifying information is redacted,” he said in a court filing. “As a result, careful, manual review is necessary to ensure that information is identified and redacted before materials are released.”
In a filing earlier this month Mr. Clayton had suggested a universe of more than 2 million documents still needing review. He said the department had posted 12,285 documents, spanning 125,575 pages.
In this latest filing, he said, “millions of pages of materials” have now been checked over.
Epstein was convicted of soliciting underage girls for prostitution. He was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges when he took his own life in 2019.
An accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been convicted of sex trafficking.
The judges overseeing both of those criminal cases have been roped into refereeing some of the disclosure questions surrounding the Epstein files.
One of them, Judge Paul Engelmayer, earlier this month shot down a request from the two lawmakers who wrote the Epstein Files law to establish a “special master” to oversee the Justice Department’s efforts.
