WASHINGTON — The Justice Department told a judge Tuesday that it has reviewed "several million" pages of files related to Jeffrey Epstein in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
In the four-page filing, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote that they expect to complete the review and redaction process "in the near term,” but declined to provide a specific date.
"The Department is not able to provide a specific date at this time and cautions that its ongoing processes, including its quality control checks and document management system preparations, may require additional efforts to ensure the protection of victim identifying information while complying with the broad demands of the Act," the filing said.
The filing comes more than a month after the deadline for the Justice Department to release all its files related to the convicted sex offender. While the department has said that it has released several thousand pages of documents in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, that is only a fraction of the department's records related to Epstein.
On Tuesday, though, the Justice Department told Judges Richard M. Berman and Paul A. Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that it continues "to make substantial progress" in its efforts to review the documents and redact victims’ identifying information and privileged information while engaging in a quality control process.
"Department attorneys, agents, and others have dedicated days and weeks to compliance with the Act and will continue to do so until it is complete," they wrote.
The Justice Department officials wrote that the “materials have been subject to manual review by hundreds of Department employees,” in consultation with lawyers for victims and the victims themselves.
The files, they wrote, include internal department communications, documents “acquired and created in the course of the various investigations,” and audio and video files.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law Nov. 19, and it required Bondi to release all of the department's Epstein files within 30 days.
Epstein died by suicide in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. Years earlier, he served about a year in a county jail in Florida after he signed a controversial non-prosecution agreement that stopped a federal investigation into his alleged abuse of dozens of teenage girls in return for his pleading guilty to lesser state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution.
