WASHINGTON – The Justice Department will miss a legal deadline Friday to release all files from its inquiry of Jeffrey Epstein, a top official said, prolonging a scandal that has come to plague the Trump governance.
The Epstein Files Openness Act, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, unequivocally required the department to release its full trove of files by midnight Friday, marking 30 days since passage.
The department committed to releasing hundreds of thousands of records by that deadline. But hundreds of thousands more were still under review and would take weeks more to release, said todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general.
“I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today several hundred thousand and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche told Fox News on Friday.
The delay drew immediate condemnation from Democrats in key oversight roles.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, and rep. Jamie Raskin (D-md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, accused President Trump and his administration in a statement friday of “violating federal law as they continue covering up the facts and the evidence about Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long, billion-dollar, international sex trafficking ring,” and said they were “examining all legal options.”
Already, congressional efforts to force the release of documents from the FBI’s investigations into Epstein have produced a trove of the disgraced financier’s emails and other records from his estate.
Some made reference to Trump and added to a long-evolving portrait of the social relationship that Epstein and Trump shared for years, before what Trump has described as a falling out.In one email in early 2019, during Trump’s first term in the White House, Epstein wrote to author and journalist Michael Wolff that trump “knew about the girls.”
in a 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, who was later convicted of conspiring with epstein to help him sexually abuse young girls, Epstein wrote, “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him … he has never once been mentioned.”
Maxwell responded: “I have been thinking about that…”
Trump has strongly denied any wrongdoing, and downplayed the importance of the files. He has also intermittently worked to block their release, even while suggesting publicly that he would not be opposed to it.His administration’s resistance to releasing all of the FBI’s files, and fumbling with their reasons for withholding documents, was overcome only after Republican lawmakers broke off and joined Democrats in passing the transparency measure.
The resistance has also riled manny in the president’s base, with their intrigue and anger over the files remaining stickier and harder to shake for Trump than any other political vulnerability.
It remained unclear Friday afternoon what additional revelations would come from the anticipated du