Millions of pages of new Epstein files went up — and several thousand have already come down, after victims complained the files contained information that could reveal their identities.
The Justice Department told federal judges Monday that it worked through the weekend to take files offline. It also pulled down some files it admitted shouldn’t have been posted as-is in the first place.
“To that end, out of the larger production described above, the department now has taken down several thousands of documents and media that may have inadvertently included victim-identifying information due to various factors, including technical or human error,” Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, told U.S. District Judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer in a letter.
Mr. Clayton also repeated a pledge to let members of Congress get a look at versions of the documents without the privacy redactions.
Some 3.5 million pages of files, 2,000 videos and 180,000 images were posted on Friday.
The release — a response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law last year — has proved fraught with complications.
The Justice Department missed the deadline by more than a month, then faced criticism as some documents were posted and then pulled.
More takedowns may be coming, too.
Mr. Clayton said victims and their representatives made numerous requests for redactions, and the department itself is running searches against the database to see what files need altering.
That includes some cases where a victim was previously unknown to the government, Mr. Clayton said.
“The department through the weekend has had a team running supplemental searches to identify missed redactions when a victim or counsel raises a concern that a victim is appearing in the public database and is now additionally running searches to identify potentially missed redactions even where counsel or a victim has not contacted the department,” he wrote.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said nearly 100 victims’ identities were shared in more than a thousand instances. He said the fact that so many documents were initially posted with victims’ information was a black eye for the administration.
He contrasted that with the department pulling down documents that contained what it called “untrue and sensationalist claims” against President Trump.
“It’s one thing for the DOJ to miss a couple redactions here or there — and that’s still bad. But to fail thousands of times to protect people’s identities begs the question if this was intentional,” he said. “And look, the DOJ’s failure to protect the identities of the victims is bad enough — but what makes it even more heinous is how far the DOJ went to protect Donald Trump during these releases.”
