On Friday, the Justice Department finally unveiled some 3 million documents from the criminal investigations of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in accordance with a law that established a deadline of Dec. 19, 2025, for making the material public. The DOJ’s statement on the release, which includes more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, noted that this brings their total disclosures about the notorious and well-connected sex trafficker to about 3.5 million pages.
According to the DOJ, the documents came from a variety of law enforcement proceedings related to Epstein’s activities and eventual death by suicide in a jail cell in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. “These files were collected from five primary sources including the Florida and New York cases against Epstein, the New York case against Maxwell, the New York cases investigating Epstein’s death, the Florida case investigating a former butler of Epstein, multiple FBI investigations, and the Office of Inspector General investigation into Epstein’s death,” the department explained.
For the past year, Donald Trump — a close friend of Epstein’s for more than a decade before a falling out in the mid-2000s — has faced hard questions about why his administration was not publishing the so-called “Epstein files” as he had promised to during his 2024 presidential campaign. In the first year of his second term, he tried to dismiss the sordid Epstein saga (and his heavily documented relationship with the financier) as “bullshit” and a “hoax,” to no avail. His MAGA base was further incensed when the DOJ announced in July 2025 that it had found no evidence that Epstein kept a “client list” of people he trafficked girls to or that he was murdered in a scheme protect his associates from prosecution. (His accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of sex trafficking and conspiracy charges in 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.)
In November, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by Trump, which required the U.S. Attorney General to make the content of the multiple Epstein investigations “publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format.”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press briefing on Friday that the DOJ has 6 million documents in total but would not unseal all of them in order to protect victims and avoid disseminating the child sexual abuse material included. He also declared that the department had not sought to shield Trump in any way when preparing the latest batch of files to drop. “We comply with the act, and there is no ‘protect President Trump.’ We didn’t protect or not protect anybody,” Blanche said. “I mean, I think that there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s nothing I can do about that.”
A group representing Epstein’s survivors, which has roundly criticized the Trump administration’s handling of files on him, blasted Friday’s disclosures as incomplete and damaging to those abused. “This latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files is being sold as transparency, but what it actually does is expose survivors,” the group said in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. “Once again, survivors are having their names and identifying information exposed, while the men who abused us remain hidden and protected. That is outrageous. As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy. This is a betrayal of the very people this process is supposed to serve.”
“The Justice Department cannot claim it is finished releasing files until every legally required document is released and every abuser and enabler is fully exposed,” the survivor group’s statement continued. “We need to hear directly from Attorney General Pam Bondi when she appears before the House Judiciary Committee on February 11.” Last February, Bondi weathered significant backlash for a much-hyped stunt in which she distributed binders of Epstein documents to MAGA influencers only for it to quickly emerge that these documents were already publicly available. She is expected to be grilled on the Epstein case as well as Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department to seek retribution against political enemies.
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Included in Friday’s dump are documents from the FBI, which include allegations that individuals made to the agency about Trump while he was running for president. The Justice Department insisted that these allegations are baseless. “This production may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos, as everything that was sent to the FBI by the public was included in the production that is responsive to the Act,” the DOJ said. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
Among these uncorroborated complaints that mention Trump are graphic accounts of sexual abuse that name other powerful men who knew Epstein, including Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz, who for years represented him as an attorney. Multiple tips led to follow-up contact from the FBI, according to the documents, though it’s not clear if any resulted in an official and extensive investigation. A number of the accounts temporarily vanished from the DOJ website on Friday, then reappeared, prompting some on social media to speculate that the White House may have sought to cover them up, though there is no evidence that it did so.
Another person to come up in the new tranche of documents was Elon Musk. Emails showed that Epstein and Musk corresponded in December 2013 — five years after Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida and required to register as a sex offender — about plans to meet on Epstein’s private Caribbean island, Little Saint James, over the New Year holiday. “We will be in St. Bart’s,” Musk wrote at one point. “When should we head to your island on the 2nd?” It’s not clear whether the visit they discussed ever took place, although Epstein did offer to fly Musk in on a helicopter.
Amid a public feud last year following his exit from the government as the administrator of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Musk accused Trump of withholding Epstein documents because he was named in them. “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,” he wrote in an X post in June. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” He later deleted his posts about Trump’s connections to Epstein.
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, also planned a trip to Epstein’s private island, according to 2012 emails included in Friday’s document drop. In an interview last year, Lutnick claimed that he had cut off all contact with Epstein in 2005, but the exchange from seven years later, which had not previously been disclosed, shows that he inquired about bringing his wife and children to Little Saint James for a meal. A subsequent message from Epstein to Lutnick read “Nice seeing you,” suggesting that the visit did take place, but Lutnick claimed to The New York Times on Friday that he “spent zero time” with Epstein.
Blanche downplayed the possibility of exposing anyone else’s involvement in Epstein’s crimes. “I don’t think the public or you all are going to uncover men within the Epstein files who abused these women, unfortunately,” he told reporters, although he vowed to go after individuals if evidence agains them came to light. “I don’t know whether there are men out there that abused these women,” he said. “If we learn about information and evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will.”
From Rolling Stone US
