The Justice Department will release hundreds of thousands of pages from the long-concealed “Epstein files” following months of pressure from both political parties and many of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking victims.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said “several hundred thousand documents” are slated for release by Friday’s midnight deadline mandated under a bipartisan bill signed by President Trump last month.
Additional files will be made public in the next few weeks, Mr. Blanche said.
Democrats on Friday threatened “prosecution” of anyone who tries to conceal information in the sex offender’s files.
Thousands of documents have already been released over the past year by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after it subpoenaed the Justice Department for the information. The documents made public included photos, emails and other material exposing Epstein’s accumulation of young women and his connection to powerful, wealthy and influential men.
The most recent dump led to the resignation of Harvard professor Larry Summers, who had been treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama.
Emails showed Mr. Summers remained a close friend to Epstein despite the financier’s conviction on charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor and lawsuits from women who accused him of sexually abusing them.
Epstein was an accused sex trafficker facing federal prosecution for victimizing underage girls when he committed suicide in his New York City jail cell in 2019.
Mr. Trump, a former Epstein pal, promised on the campaign trail to release all of the Epstein files, but his Justice Department held back some of the documents. The secrecy angered Democrats and the GOP MAGA base that accused the Trump administration of a cover-up.
On Friday, Mr. Blanche told Fox News the Justice Department is working to protect identities of the victims, which likely means there will be redactions in the released material.
Mr. Blanche also told Fox not every document in the files will be made public today, despite the Dec. 19 deadline.
More files, he said, will be released in the coming weeks.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers who authored the legislation forcing the release of the files said all of the documents must be made public on Friday.
“Any person who attempts to conceal or scrub the files will be subject to prosecution under the law,” Rep. Ro Khanna, California Democrat, said.
Epstein and Mr. Trump were neighbors in Palm Beach, Florida, and were friends in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The two had a falling out over a real estate deal in 2004, and Mr. Trump said he kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club in 2007 after Epstein hired one of his club employees, Virginia Giuffre, who later became a prominent Epstein sex trafficking victim and died in April.
Epstein’s circle of friends spanned Hollywood, academia and the world of politics. The list included Mr. Clinton, filmmaker Woody Allen, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, who settled a lawsuit with Giuffre and lost his royal title over his Epstein friendship, and tech billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates.
None of the men are accused of wrongdoing.
