The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington on Friday. The department has released a new trove of documents from its investigations into Jeffrey Epstein.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The U.S. Department of Justice has released an incomplete and heavily redacted series of files on child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, drawing accusations of again trying to avoid full disclosure after months of stonewalling by President Donald Trump.
On Friday, the deadline set by last month’s act of Congress to release the files, the justice department published hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and photographs.
But much information was blacked out, including all 119 pages of grand jury testimony in Mr. Epstein’s case, and a top justice official said the department had withheld some other material entirely.
The documents include numerous photos of former president Bill Clinton – including one of him lounging in a hot tub – even as many other men in the photographs were blacked out. Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to highlight Mr. Clinton’s relationship with Mr. Epstein as pressure mounted over Mr. Trump’s friendship with the disgraced financier.
References to Mr. Trump, who appears to have been close with Mr. Epstein before a falling-out in the mid-2000s, are relatively sparse in the documents, mostly consisting of photographs of the pair together that are already public.
Earlier: Justice Department races to meet Friday deadline to release Epstein files
Mr. Epstein, who was convicted of child sex trafficking in 2008, died in his jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on more extensive charges. His death was ruled a suicide.
Mr. Trump and Attorney-General Pam Bondi refused for months to release the documents, relenting only after congressmen Thomas Massie, a Republican and Ro Khanna, a Democrat, rallied legislators to pass a law forcing the release.
On Friday, Mr. Khanna said he and Mr. Massie were exploring options, ranging from the impeachment of justice department officials to referring them for criminal prosecution.
“The reality is, Pam Bondi has obfuscated for months,” he said in a video. “It is an incomplete release with too many redactions.”
Among the missing documents, Mr. Khanna said, was a draft indictment of Mr. Epstein by prosecutors, which he said should contain the names of other “rich and powerful men” who took part in the “abuse of young girls” on Mr. Epstein’s private Caribbean island.
Mr. Massie wrote on X that the document dump “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law,” and warned that a future justice department “could convict” Ms. Bondi over it.
Todd Blanche, Ms. Bondi’s deputy, acknowledged on Friday that, in addition to the redactions, the Department of Justice had withheld some files entirely. He said this was because the department had not yet had time to redact them all.
“I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks,” he said, adding that those documents would also number in the hundreds of thousands of pages.
The law allows redactions of the documents in some cases, such as to protect the identities of victims or the integrity of ongoing investigations. But the redactions released Friday appeared to go beyond that, including blacking out the faces of men from photos that have even been previously released.
Among them is Steven Pinker, a Canadian psychologist who is a Harvard professor and notable author. Mr. Pinker’s face is redacted from an image with Mr. Epstein on the financier’s jet. However, the released files include a brief video of the two men speaking together on Feb. 20, 2002. Prof. Pinker’s presence on that flight was revealed earlier by his presence on flight manifests.
“I had accepted an offer from my literary agent, John Brockman, to join him, his wife Katinka Matson, and the philosopher Dan Dennett on a flight on Epstein’s plane to the TED conference in Monterey, California,” Prof. Pinker told The Globe and Mail Friday night.
At the time, Mr. Epstein’s “crimes were not known by anyone,” Prof. Pinker said, adding that the two men never forged a relationship.
“I had the bad luck of being close to several people who did have close ties,” Prof. Pinker said. He added: ‘I could never stand Epstein. As a result of that conversation on the plane, I immediately concluded that he was a dilettante and a smartass, not a serious intellectual.”
The documents did, however, contain numerous photos of Mr. Clinton, including one in which he appears to be sharing an airplane seat with a woman, others with Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s close associate, and celebrities including Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker.
The photos contained no caption information or context, but Mr. Clinton has long been known to have had a relationship with Mr. Epstein, including a humanitarian trip to Africa that the pair took in 2002. Mr. Clinton has not been accused of taking part in or knowing about Mr. Epstein’s crimes.
David Shribman: Epstein e-mails create unlikely alliance between MAGA and the left
Angel Ureña, a spokesperson for Mr. Clinton, accused the Trump administration of releasing the photos of the former president on Friday to distract from the current President’s friendship with Mr. Epstein.
“There are two types of people here. The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light. The second group continued relationships with him after. We’re in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that,” he said in a statement.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, tweeted several of the photos of Mr. Clinton and accused the “liberal media” or being “sickos” for complaining about redactions in the documents. “Why aren’t they talking about Bill?”
Other celebrities in the files include business magnate Richard Branson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew. One CD of photos in the files is labelled with the name of Walter Cronkite, the former CBS anchor.
Despite the extensive excisions, the files do offer some glimpses into Mr. Epstein’s life and the investigations of him.
Notes from what appear to be an FBI witness interview in 2019 quote an unnamed person saying that Mr. Epstein checked a girl’s identification to ensure she was underage. According to the witness, the financier also complained that one girl brought to him was “dark” and that others were too old. “You know what I’m into,” Mr. Epstein said, which the witness understood to mean “young, petite, underage.”
The Decibel: The Epstein scandal and the Canadians who knew him
The documents also confirm that the FBI received a complaint about Mr. Epstein a decade before he was arrested. According to the file, a professional artist said that Mr. Epstein stole photos she had taken of her 16 and 12-year-old sisters for her work. He then asked the artist to “take pictures of young girls at swimming pools.” If the artist told anyone about this, he threatened to “burn her house down.”
The artist’s name is redacted, but the details match the case of Maria Farmer, a former employee of Mr. Epstein’s who has long said that she made a police complaint about him in 1996.
Releasing the Epstein files was long a cause célèbre among right-wing influencers, who demanded the government name other powerful people who may have known about or taken part in his crimes. Earlier this year, Ms. Bondi said she had Mr. Epstein’s “client list” sitting on her desk and gave the influencers binders of previously-published Epstein material in a photo-opportunity.
But over the summer, she reversed course, refusing to publish the justice department documents. Mr. Trump repeatedly referred to the idea of releasing the files as a “hoax.”
Other Epstein documents subpoenaed by a congressional committee from his estate included emails in which Mr. Epstein said Mr. Trump “knew about the girls” and had spent time with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims. In one conversation with a journalist, Mr. Epstein said he was once Mr. Trump’s “closest friend.”
Robyn Urback: The Epstein saga has Trump looking scared. That’s a new test for MAGA loyalty
Mr. Trump has denied that he knew anything about Mr. Epstein’s crimes and says their friendship ended before his first arrest.
The fight over the files was the first significant rupture within Mr. Trump’s MAGA base since he returned to office earlier this year.
In candid comments to Vanity Fair published earlier this week, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said Mr. Trump was wrong to claim that Mr. Clinton had visited Mr. Epstein’s private island and suggested there was nothing incriminating in the files about the former president. “The President was wrong about that,” she said of Mr. Trump’s assertions.
She also criticized Ms. Bondi’s handling of the file. “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” she said, referring to the MAGA influencers.