Ten days past the official Congressionally-set deadline to publish all federal files on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the U.S. Department of Justice is still releasing the documents piecemeal.
Congress last month overwhelmingly passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated that the DOJ declassify by Dec. 19 all information pertaining to Epstein, who died in jail in 2019, and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
But the DOJ is still in the process of releasing all the documents, many of which contain significant redactions that critics say violates the order for transparency. Others have discovered that the agency redacted some of the documents incorrectly, allowing viewers to simply copy and paste the redactions into another document to read the underlying text.
The content redacted raises further questions on whether the DOJ is fully complying with the requirement for full transparency.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act expressly forbids the DOJ from redacting relevant information unless it could potentially jeopardize victim privacy, national security, or prosecution efforts.
But, as revealed on social media by political commentator Ed Krassenstein, the DOJ apparently violated that edict in at least one of the documents.
One of the uncovered redactions included information on how Epstein attempted to pay off witnesses of his sex trafficking operations and destroy evidence of his crimes.
“Defendants also actively obstructed law enforcement by denying investigators access to Little St. James beyond its boat dock. Defendants also attempted to conceal their criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct by paying large sums of money to participant-witnesses, including by paying for their attorneys’ fees and case costs in litigation related to this conduct. Epstein also threatened harm to victims and helped release damaging stories about them to damage their credibility when they tried to go public with their stories of being trafficked and sexually abused. Epstein also instructed one or more Epstein Enterprise participant-witnesses to destroy evidence relevant to ongoing court proceedings involving Defendants’ criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct,” it reads.
“So the obvious question is: why was this information being hidden at all? Why redact references to known participant-witnesses and lawyers connected to this scheme?” Krassenstein said. “There is no legitimate reason for these redactions.”
As of Monday, the DOJ has not responded to the redactions discovery. The agency announced on Christmas Eve that the FBI recently “uncovered over a million more documents potentially related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.”
“Due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks,” it concluded.
