Epstein victims’ fury as Trump workforce releases tiny fraction of recordsdata – ‘What are they hiding?’
The US Government was required by law to release all the Epstein Files held by the Justice Department by midnight last night. What was released amounts to about 1% of the total
Victims voiced their fury last night after Donald Trump’s administration released only a fraction of the Epstein files before the legal deadline – with hundreds of pages blacked out. Photos of dead paedophile Jeffrey Epstein with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson painted a picture of his jet-setting lifestyle.
Epstein himself is seen with dozens of different young women – an in one image appears to pose with his shirt off, sitting near an unidentified toddler. And there were hundreds of murky images of his New York lair and private island bolthole as well as countless unidentified women in states of undress.
Inclusion in the files is not an indication of wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. But the files published on Friday night are thought to make up about 1% of the 300 Gigabytes of case files, transcripts, images and video held by the FBI and Justice Department.
“What are they hiding?”, asked Gloria Allred, a lawyer representing 20 of dead paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. “What is in there that perhaps some powerful people would not like revealed? … Survivors are fighting to have the release of all the files [because] they want accountability. If there are rich, powerful, famous men who engaged in or assisted in or conspired to sex traffic underage girls, they want to know who those people are. They want to know what the evidence against them was.”
Todd Blanche, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General said hundreds of thousands of documents would be released before the legal deadline last night. But the redaction process, which he said was to protect the names of victims, meant it would take weeks to release everything the Department had on Epstein.
The failure has infuriated victims and members of congress, who accused the Trump administration of breaking the law. In the face of mounting pressure for transparency, President Trump signed a law requiring the Justice Department to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” in their possession.
The law allows for the identities of victims, and explicit imagery to be redacted – but it forbids them to redact to protect powerful people from “embarrassment”.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee yesterday (SAT) accused the Justice Department of breaking an act of congress with the limited and redacted disclosures. Suhas Subramanyam from the US House Oversight Committee told CNN: “They are absolutely in violation of the law, they just admitted they were in violation of the law.
“The law said they needed to release everything by today. Not starting today, not part of it today, all of it by today.” He added: “There’s no excuse for this. They are in violation of the law and we will pursue every possible legal avenue.”
New York senator Chuck Schumer said the “heavily redacted” documents released on Friday were “just a fraction of the whole body of evidence” – adding that pages of blacked out text “violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law”.
And Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Committee accused the Administration of “protecting President Trump and other perpetrators”.
Trump has repeatedly sought to distance himself from his 15-year friendship with Epstein by suggesting Democrats, including Clinton, were closer to him for longer. On Friday, Trump ended a public announcement on drug prices without taking questions – a highly unusual move for him. And he did not mention the release of the files during a lengthy rally speech in North Carolina.
Mr Blanche, who was previously Trump’s personal lawyer, made headlines earlier this year when he visited Epstein’s British fixer Ghislaine Maxwell in prison for an interview. Maxwell denied Trump was involved with any of Epstein’s crimes, describing him as a “gentleman”. Days later she was moved to a cushier prison to serve the remainder of her 20-year sex trafficking sentence.
Many of the photos, court transcripts, and documents in the release have already been in the public domain for some years. And as many as 550 pages – including crucial transcripts of evidence from the Grand Jury hearings that led to Epstein and Maxwell’s prosecutions – were blacked out entirely.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor appears clearly in just one of the photos – laying across the laps of five women, apparently at Sandringham, with Maxwell watching over him. Other photos thought to have been taken during visits with the former Duke of York, show Epstein and Maxwell shooting at Balmoral an in a box at Royal Ascot, demonstrating the access to Britain’s high society granted to the pair by Andrew.
More than a thousand women are thought to have been trafficked and abused by Epstein, with several victims thought to be British. Several images in the cache released by Trump’s Justice Department feature Bill Clinton, including snaps of the former President relaxing in a swimming pool alongside a woman whose face is redacted.
The photos were apparently taken on one of several trips President Clinton took with Epstein during 2003 and 2004, including a visit to London. The former President is seen visiting the Churchill War Rooms with Maxwell and actor Kevin Spacey. Other photos show Clinton in the back garden of Number 10 Downing Street and Maxwell posing by the front door. Epstein is known to have briefly met then-PM Tony Blair in 2002 at the invitation of Lord Mandelson.
In another picture, Clinton is shown dining alongside Maxwell and Mick Jagger – with many more showing backstage views of the stage at Rolling Stones concerts. Another shows Clinton on a private jet with a woman sitting on his lap, her face blacked out. And a striking image shows Clinton with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. Jackson posed up for a snap with Epstein, also included in the cache.
Sir Richard Branson and Lord Mandelson are also pictured with Epstein in the collection. Two photos of Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson with unidentified females were also included in the document dump.
But the bulk of the photos are unsettling, forensic images of Epstein’s homes in New York, Palm Beach, Florida and Little St James, the Caribbean bolthole that became known as “Epstein Island.” Photos taken during the FBI’s raid of his New York Lair show his massage room, bedrooms and study – decorated with dozens of framed photos of nude women.
They show Epstein’s safe broken open by FBI Agents, with the contents – including passports and DVDs – strewn on top. The infamous painting of Clinton wearing Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress is shown hanging in the security office.
At all three properties, photos of the gaudily decorated living spaces are interspersed with open drawers and cupboards where videos, DVDs, thousands of photos, sex toys and vibrators were hidden from view. Epstein was found dead in his cell at a federal jail in Manhattan, New York, in August 2019 while he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.
