The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says more details about the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein could soon be released, though the agency is not giving a specific timeline for when those files will be made public.
In a letter obtained by Scripps News that was sent Tuesday to two judges overseeing the order to release files tied to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the DOJ is making “substantial progress” in reviewing the files. However, the department is “not able to provide a specific date” for when they will be published, as required by law.
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“The Department currently expects that it will complete these processes with respect to substantially all of the potentially responsive documents, including publication to the Epstein Library website, in the near term,” the letter stated.
The DOJ added that its ongoing work — including quality control checks and preparing its document management systems — “may require additional efforts to ensure the protection of victim identifying information while complying with the broad demands of the Act.”
It has now been over one month since the DOJ was expected to release all files related to its investigation into Epstein and Maxwell. Officials have indicated that just 1% of the total records have entered the public domain, despite there being upwards of two million files that were legally ordered to be published under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
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According to the DOJ, hundreds of staffers are still reviewing the files to redact sensitive information before they are made public.
"As the Department previously noted, 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," Bondi and Blanche stated in their letter. "As a result careful, manual review is necessary to ensure that information is identified and redacted before materials are released."
