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Jeffrey Epstein files: don’t be fooled. Millions of files are still unreleased | Moira Donegan

The justice department released a trove of 3.5m files related to the dead financier and pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche declaring that the release would likely be the last major declassification of files relating to Epstein. Federal prosecutors had identified 6 million files that were “potentially responsive” to the law, meaning that there are millions of files that have still not been released.

The release marked a belated and partial compliance with a bill passed by Congress late last year, which had mandated that all government documents pertaining to Epstein and the various law enforcement investigations into his sexual abuse of girls be made public by 19 December 2025.

Representatives Thomas Massie, a Republican, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat, quickly condemned the incomplete release and demanded access to the un-redacted files.

“The DOJ said it identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages but is releasing only about 3.5 million after review and redactions. This raises questions as to why the rest are being withheld,” Khanna said, adding: “Failing to release these files only shields the powerful individuals who were involved and hurts the public’s trust in our institutions.”

The justice department had long complained that the sheer volume of files related to Epstein and the delicate nature of some of the information contained therein meant that they needed more time to redact sensitive information related to victims, and that therefore only some documents could be released.

On Friday, in a letter to Congress, Blanche claimed that some tens of thousands additional documents were not being made public, both because of the presence of child sexual abuse material and because of information contained therein which could identify and endanger victims. But many of the documents made available to the public on Friday did in fact contain names and other sensitive information about women Epstein abused, leading some victims to condemn the Department of Justice’s “betrayal” and observers to wonder what, exactly, the justice department has been doing with the documents, if not redacting such sensitive content.

That the documents’ release was announced by Blanche, and not by his boss, attorney general Pam Bondi, reflects growing tensions within the administration as criticism continues to mount over the bungled response to the Epstein controversy and questions about the nature of Donald Trump’s apparently longstanding and intimate friendship with Epstein persist.

In making his announcement, Blanche, who previously worked as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, insisted that the justice department “did not protect Trump” in its decisions about what to redact and release. The White House, he said, “had no oversight” and “did not tell this department how to do our review, and what to look for, and what to redact or not redact”.

However, he also claimed that Trump did in fact express preferences regarding the review, claiming that the president has pushed for “maximum transparency”. The US president had opposed the release of the files until it became clear that a congressional vote would override him late last year.

The documents themselves contain 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to Epstein, though according to Blanche, many of these were not taken by Epstein himself, but were gathered as part of the dead man’s estate – including a large cache of commercial pornography, in addition to the homemade abuse material depicting Epstein’s underage victims.

The cache also appears to contain a large number of uncorroborated tips to authorities from members of the public about Epstein’s conduct, several of which come from people who claimed in their messages to have been abused by Donald Trump.

Journalists at the Guardian and elsewhere continue to comb through the material – which is uploaded tens of thousands of files at a time to the Department of Justice’s website, with no index and no explanation of how or when particular documents were obtained. The full picture of what is revealed by the newly unsealed documents will not emerge for some time.

But it is unlikely that the new material will quell the public’s interest in the case, or mitigate their sense that Epstein and his impunity represent a paradigmatic example of the ruling elite’s personal corruption, their imperviousness to law or consequence, and their back-scratching, malignant coziness with one another.

Already, the newly released documents further underscore the extent to which Epstein was integrated into the social life of some of the worlds’ most powerful people, even after he was initially convicted of charges relating to child sexual abuse in 2008. Among other things, the emails show that in 2012, the businessperson Howard Lutnik – now Trump’s commerce secretary – appears to have visited Epstein’s private Island with his wife and children. Lutnik had previously claimed that he had cut off contact with Epstein around 2005, before the financier’s initial conviction.

In a 2013 email exchange between Epstein and the billionaire Richard Branson, Branson writes to Epstein: “Anytime you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!” Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a large-scale financial backer of Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, had previously posted on X that Epstein “tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED”. But the emails show a warmer relationship between Musk and Epstein, and in 2012 Musk wrote to Epstein with enthusiasm about the prospect of visiting the pedophile financier’s Caribbean island. “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk asked. Both men have denied wrongdoing and attempted to downplay the extent of their connections to Epstein.

The Trump administration worked hard throughout 2025 to avoid the release of the Epstein files; once the groundswell of public pressure to publish them became too great for congress to resist, they have worked to minimize the public’s sense that the documents reveal anything particularly damning, at least for the president and his allies.

But the administration cannot contain the Epstein story because by its nature, the scandal reveals the untrustworthiness and mendacity of the very elites that Trump and his movement now represent. Todd Blanche had an unenviable task on Friday, standing up before the nation to claim that the administration had nothing to hide, that the people in power are acting in good faith and telling the public the whole story. After what the world has learned about those people in power from the Epstein story itself, will anyone believe him?