A significant number of redactions are anticipated, according to one source, with each attorney managing over 1,000 documents since Thanksgiving week. This painstaking process, driven by executive and legal privacy concerns, along with victim protection, will likely continue up to the last minute.
Attorneys at the US Department of Justice’s National Security Division handling the Epstein files reportedly feel they lack clear guidance on maximizing transparency within legal boundaries, as per several insiders.
Counterintelligence experts have been directed to set aside nearly all other responsibilities to focus on the Epstein documents, according to two individuals familiar with the situation. However, some attorneys have opted out of participating.
This scenario indicates that the ongoing political challenges surrounding the transparency of the Epstein files might persist beyond the approaching Friday deadline.
Insiders suggest that even after Friday, the released documents will likely contain substantial redactions, potentially fueling public scrutiny over transparency issues.
Document specialists are already bracing for the possibility that the Justice Department’s release may feature more redactions than necessary, potentially including errors in what is withheld or disclosed. Given the sheer volume and the rapid pace at which attorneys are working, mistakes, particularly involving sensitive personal information, could occur, according to these sources.
“Either they’re going to screw it up or they’re going to withhold things. It wouldn’t surprise me,” said one lawyer outside the Justice Department who is awaiting the release to determine whether there should be complaints made about how the redaction work was done. “Some of it may be incompetence as much as deliberate.”
The Epstein files are vast, and thousands of records held by different sections of federal law enforcement have to be picked through to determine whether they are responsive to the transparency law’s requirements or need to be redacted because of various confidentiality rules and to protect Epstein’s victims.
There are only four pages the lawyers have been given as internal guidance to follow to make the redactions, one of the sources said. And nearly all of the guidelines the lawyers have received articulate exemptions to the transparency law.
There are also logistical headaches in the work. Duplicates in what the lawyers are working through haven’t been taken out of the cache, one source told CNN. That creates more of a possibility there may not be consistent redactions across the documents or that redactions may be done incorrectly in spots. Plus it adds hundreds of pages more for lawyers to process than what they normally would have to handle if the duplicates were taken out.
The Justice Department has flubbed redactions in a massive document production already this year. When the National Security Division worked on releasing 60,000 pages related to the Kennedy assassination earlier this year, in another drop-everything task with a deadline, social security numbers and other private information of more than 400 former congressional staffers and others were mistakenly made public, according to the Washington Post.
The stakes are high for women who suffered abuse under Epstein.
Some Epstein victims have said they feel as if they’re in the dark on how the files are being prepared for the release, according to CNN reporting earlier this week. The Epstein survivors who spoke recently told CNN that they had gotten no outreach from the US Department of Justice ahead of the files’ release.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment for this article.
Who’s doing the redacting
The Justice Department’s National Security Division inherited the redaction work from the FBI after the law was passed for transparency on the Epstein files.
It’s surprising to many national security law specialists that that’s who’s doing the work, given the division’s historical emphasis on classified matters and the lack of a nexus between Epstein and national security interests.
Several sources said, however, that’s where the manpower is at the Justice Department this year.
The latest round of Epstein redaction work started in fervour over Thanksgiving, shortly after Congress passed the transparency act.
The FBI had previously done a similar push on redactions earlier in the Trump administration. During that effort, in response to an over-promising of transparency by Attorney General Pam Bondi that the department didn’t deliver, agents worked around the clock, some in overnight shifts that supplanted other threat investigations the FBI was working on.
The national security lawyers aren’t among the Justice Department division that classically handles document processing, or even sex crimes or conspiracies, as had been alleged of the late Epstein and his convicted paramour Ghislaine Maxwell. A different part of the Justice Department where lawyers handle Freedom of Information Act requests are more typically tasked to handle document redaction projects, especially before this Trump administration. The national security section also isn’t the office that investigated Epstein years ago â another group that could weigh in on the files and transparency.
Still, the national security division has previously handled substantial redaction projects this year for topics that aren’t core to their legal work â including those related to releases of the Martin Luther King Jr and John F. Kennedy assassination historical files.
While the National Security Division has been gutted during this Trump administration, it’s still many dozens of lawyers strong. Those lawyers are experienced in working with sensitive data, with extensive, elaborate redaction needs.
