The Department of Justice is seeking to bring in as many as 400 additional lawyers to help it comb through approximately 5.2 million pages of documents related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, according to a report.
The DOJ assigned more than 200 lawyers to the files in late November, who were tasked with reviewing the material and making redactions in the interest of safeguarding the sex offender’s victims, protecting national security, and preventing ongoing investigations from being compromised.
However, The New York Times reports that the department is now seeking additional help because the task has proven much larger than initially anticipated and is drawing in prosecutors from the U.S. attorneys’ offices in New York and Florida, as well as others who specialize in national security and criminal cases.
The Times’s 5.2 million figure, citing departmental sources, is the largest estimate to date of the DOJ’s total holdings related to Epstein.
The review of the documents is now expected to take until at least January 20 to complete, according to the newspaper.
The near-unanimous passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act through both the House of Representatives and Senate in November compelled President Donald Trump to sign it into law, setting in motion a 30-day countdown for the DOJ to release all of the documents in its possession relating to Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial.
The deadline duly arrived on December 19, and the DOJ made a large tranche of the files available for download via its website.
However, the release proved to be incomplete, heavily redacted, and lacking in context, drawing complaints from representativesThomas Massie and Ro Khanna, who had led the call to publish the information, and from Epstein’s victims, still seeking justice.
A second sizable tranche was uploaded on December 23, prompting interested parties to sort through it two days before Christmas, only for the DOJ to subsequently say it had uncovered “over a million more” documents possibly tied to the Epstein case and that it would take weeks to release them all.
“We have lawyers working around the clock to review and make the legally required redactions to protect victims, and we will release the documents as soon as possible,” the department assured the public in a social media post on Christmas Eve.
“Due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks. The department will continue to fully comply with federal law and President Trump’s direction to release the files.”
Among the material released so far have been previously unseen photographs of Epstein with his former girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, pictures of famous public figures like Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Michael Jackson, and Sir Mick Jagger, as well as photocopies of the disgraced financier’s passports and internal FBI emails discussing aspects of his case.
Being mentioned in the files does not indicate wrongdoing.
Trump himself has also made an appearance in some of the photographs and was mentioned in an internal email sent by an unnamed assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York dating from January 2020, who wrote to colleagues pointing out that flight records obtained from Epstein’s private jet revealed the president had flown in it “many more times than previously has been reported.”
Trump has never been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein. However, he has been under intense pressure since July to release the files in their entirety and explain his past friendship with the predator, which he has said ended with an argument in the early 2000s.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that masseurs and beauticians working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, once routinely made house calls on Epstein. This courtesy ended in 2003 when one of the employees complained that the billionaire had propositioned her.
The president has expressed frustration at the ongoing public interest in the case, complaining that it is overshadowing his policy achievements and insisting in a Truth Social post on Christmas Day that he had severed ties with the abuser “long before it became fashionable” and that the fight for justice amounts to nothing more than a “Radical Left Witch Hunt” orchestrated by his political enemies.
Estranged Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene alleged in an interview with the Times Monday that Trump had yelled at her about her support for the release of the files earlier this year and said he was opposed to their publication because “My friends will get hurt.”
