The Justice Department is drowning in over 2 million files tied to the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, and the releases so far have barely scratched the surface.
The saga of Epstein’s records, mandated for release under a new transparency law, has turned into a bureaucratic quagmire with only a tiny fraction of documents made public as the deadline slipped by.
For hardworking taxpayers, this delay isn’t just frustrating—it’s a direct hit to trust in government accountability, with potential legal exposure if critical information about Epstein’s network remains buried.
Let’s rewind to mid-November 2025, when President Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, setting a tight deadline of December 19, 2025, for the Justice Department to review and release all related records.
Fast forward to late December, and the Trump administration admitted they couldn’t meet that cutoff, citing the sheer volume of material as the culprit.
With over 2 million files under scrutiny, only a few thousand have been inspected and shared with the public as of late Monday—hardly a drop in the bucket.
The Justice Department isn’t sitting idle, though—400 lawyers, including 125 Manhattan federal prosecutors, are dedicating significant chunks of their day to comb through this mountain of paperwork.
Since December 19, 2025, they’ve posted 12,285 documents—about 125,575 pages—on the DOJ’s Epstein Library webpage, but that’s still less than 1% of the total.
On Christmas Eve 2025, the DOJ revealed an additional 1 million documents potentially linked to Epstein, further ballooning the scope of this already daunting task.
Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton, speaking for Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche, told US District Judge Paul Engelmeyer, “More than 2 million documents identified as potentially responsive to the Act remain in various phases of review and redaction.”
Clayton also noted, “Based on broad initial reviews of those documents, the Department expects that a meaningful portion of the documents are copies of (or largely duplicative of) documents that had already been collected by the Department for review but still need to undergo a process of processing and deduplication.” Well, isn’t that convenient—millions of pages, and a good chunk might just be reruns?
The DOJ anticipates this slog will drag on for weeks with no firm end date, leaving the public wondering if full transparency is just a pipe dream.
Adding fuel to the fire, the Justice Department has faced sharp criticism for missing the December 19 deadline and for releasing heavily redacted files that obscure key details.
Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Ro Khanna of California, who authored the transparency law, have accused the administration of breaking the law with these delays and opaque edits—hardly a surprise to those skeptical of government overreach.
The DOJ defends its redactions as necessary to shield victim privacy and protect ongoing court cases, but when amateur sleuths found a way to uncensor some files last month by simply copying them into a word processor, as verified by the Post, it raises eyebrows about competence, doesn’t it?
