Federal law required majority of documents to be released by 19 December, but only 125,575 pages have been published

The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the so-called Epstein files, a court filing has revealed, as Democrats step up criticism of the Trump administration’s “lawlessness” for keeping records under seal.

The department conceded that only 12,285 documents, totalling 125,575 pages, relating to the disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein have been published to date, despite a federal law requiring the vast majority to be released by 19 December.

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, wrote a five-page update to Paul Engelmayer, the federal New York judge overseeing the case, on Monday, asserting that efforts to protect the identities of Epstein’s victims were a priority, and had slowed the process.

“There are more than two million documents potentially responsive to the Act that are in various phases of review,” she wrote in the letter co-signed by Todd Blanche, her deputy, and Jay Clayton, US attorney for the southern district of New York.

"What are they trying to hide?” Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said in a post to X on Monday accusing the justice department of failing to submit a required unredacted list to Congress “of all government officials and politically exposed persons” named or referenced in the files.

“It’s been 17 DAYS since the Trump DOJ first broke the law and failed to release all the Epstein files. It’s been 14 DAYS since Trump’s DOJ released anything at all – with the DOJ doing everything in its power to delay and obfuscate.”

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
      8·
      22 days ago

      Why even make a distraction? They could brazenly come out and say “we’re not releasing anymore. What are you going to do about it?”

      And Congress will just sit there going 👉👈 and nothing would happen. I truly believe that Congress has lost all power at this point. They are a collection of figureheads that couldn’t enforce a parking lot, let alone the laws of a country. They can pass whatever law, or make whatever sanction they want, but there’s no one around to actually enforce it anymore. All that power has gone to the Executive branch.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    101·
    22 days ago

    This thing is over now, isn’t it?

    A war has starte the and news media lost interest in the president being a pedophile

    Fuck, America is predictable if anything

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
      8·
      22 days ago

      I don’t think it will ever be over. The minute news slows from Venezuela the files are back in the headlines. They have to keep doing things to distract, going to be a wild ride.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      18·
      23 days ago

      Actually, the tip doesn’t allege that it was Trump’s child, it alleges that Trump was present when her uncle killed the baby. It makes no allegation about who the father is, and sadly the list of candidates would be very large in that scenario. He was there near the birth, no claim about who was there for the conception.

      I also hate to admit it, but that specific “credible evidence” was a tip submitted via an online form in October 2020. Certainly worth searching for/demanding more to see where, if anywhere, the tip went, but by itself it isn’t credible evidence. There’s so much more credible bad stuff about Trump that makes this quite believable, but until linked to more substantive stuff, probably best to stick to the more concrete stuff. I suspect there were quite a few crafted attempts at ‘October Surprises’ during the 2020 race and Epstein was a solid topic well known by the populace to try those sorts of things.

      • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
        6·
        22 days ago

        The more interesting thing about that particular piece of evidence is that it’s concrete proof of what we already know: that they’re censoring Trump’s name in the documents.

  • dalekcaan@feddit.nl
    26·
    23 days ago

    Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, wrote a five-page update to Paul Engelmayer, the federal New York judge overseeing the case, on Monday, asserting that efforts to protect the identities of Epstein’s victims co-conspirators were a priority, and had slowed the process.

    ftfy

    • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
      17·
      23 days ago

      It would take fucking minutes to auto find each victim name, and censor it, and maybe, MAYBE, a few days for a team of people to review it and manually change what wasn’t caught.

      If charges don’t come out of how this was handled, let alone for sure charging all of the child rapists and anyone that helped them, we need to burn this mother fucker down.

      • RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca
        10·
        22 days ago

        Don’t take this personally, your heart is in the right place.

        I think you can’t see the forest for the trees. There will be no charges. It will not be released. Trump will ratchet up the insanity to the level that’s needed to make child sex trafficking irrelevant.

        The only option at this point is extreme, active, hot and visible resistance. It’s the only thing that will break through. There will be no meaningful midterms. You’re in a fight for your life, and if you fail your country will become history’s next fascist experiment. Every American has to consider the world after America has subjugated it, causing untold suffering and destruction - will you be okay to live in that country? Will you be able to push the death out of your mind and live a happy life?

        • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          22 days ago

          I couldn’t, it’s constructive advice and it’s appreciated, but I do see it that way. Maybe not as deeply and as eloquently as you put it, but yeah that is exactly how I view it, but with a dash of hope I likely shouldn’t still have.

          Thanks for chiming in

      • dalekcaan@feddit.nl
        11·
        23 days ago

        I completely agree with you, but I distinctly remember saying “There’s no way Trump comes back from this” five years ago today, and yet here we are. I have very little hope for the system as it is now.

        • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          23 days ago

          Yeah, agreed. I wasn’t as hopeful then, just because all of the blatant crime starting 10 years ago and frankly decades ago, but every time I think there’s a line, like a party to or directly throwing a baby that was just murdered into a lake with witnesses around, I do think, this has got to be it.

      • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
        13·
        23 days ago

        redacting information is a lot harder than that. you often have to redact things that allow people to draw correlations that lead to identity… details like that should be redacted

        but this is ridiculous on its own, even without the enormous blunders that prove it’s about protecting co-conspirators rather than victims

        • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
          11·
          23 days ago

          I mean I do imagine it would take a bit of time, but they’ve got entire teams of people who’s entire jobs are handling that.

          It wouldn’t take this long, even if they actually needed to both protect victims and help coconspirators. It’s been literal years, and even the mandate from a few months back was an extreme amount of time.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
        4·
        22 days ago

        I mean we’re going to be finding little bedbugs of corruption from the trump admin for the next 50 years. As transparent as an iceberg.

  • adhd_traco@piefed.socialEnglish
    7·
    23 days ago

    I feel like it’s more important than ever to partition/set-up feeds to only see politics when one wants to.

    Absolute madness. The really bad kind.

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
    152·
    23 days ago

    So stop whining about it and fucking imprison all of them for contempt and have someone else release it.

    • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
      111·
      23 days ago

      “Best I’m willing to do is whine on a platform for Nazis run by my political ‘rival’” - Elected representative of the people Chuck Schumer

  • Tilgare@lemmy.world
    12·
    23 days ago

    … as Democrats step up criticism of the Trump administration’s “lawlessness” for keeping records under seal.

    Oh good! And here I was wondering if they were going to DO anything at all, but they’re on the case! Silly me for doubting the dems.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
      4·
      23 days ago

      remember both billionaire donors, ceos for both parties on the list, and most likely any d IS ON THE list, but gop probably makes up a large majority of it.

  • pyrinix@kbin.melroy.org
    65·
    23 days ago

    More damning evidence that high profile people are involved.

    Look, I don’t give a shit if they’re all not released.

    The way they’ve behaved, the way they approached the subject, the way they try downplaying it all. They’re all complicit child-fuckers.