Washington, Jan 6 (.) More than two weeks after the legal deadline to release the vast cache of files tied to the late financier-convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, the US Justice Department acknowledged on Monday that it is still reviewing millions of records and has made public less than one per cent of the total material.
In a five-page status update submitted to the federal judge who previously oversaw Epstein’s case, Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor Jay Clayton said that more than two million documents remain “in various phases of review and redaction.”
So far, the DOJ has released roughly 12,285 documents, wrote Clayton, amounting to about 125,575 pages, in response to a federal law requiring the bulk of the Epstein files to be made public by December 19.
Clayton also revealed that the DOJ recently uncovered an additional one million documents that were not initially included in its review.
While those records appear to be largely duplicative of material already under examination, he said they will still have to go through a full processing and deduplication procedure.
Describing the scope of the task, Clayton said more than 400 Justice Department attorneys are expected to spend “the next few weeks” devoting all or a substantial portion of their workday to reviewing and redacting documents.
That group includes 125 prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, where the currently captured and on-trial Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is currently facing criminal charges.
The review effort is being supported by around 100 FBI analysts with experience handling sensitive victim-related materials, Clayton added.
He said the staggered release of the files is driven by the need to carefully protect Epstein’s victims from the disclosure of identifying or deeply personal information.
Critics of the department, however, have accused it of excessive redaction of material, which it is legally required to release, including the names of prosecutors and agents involved in the investigation and internal Justice Department deliberations about the Epstein probe.
According to Clayton, the review process involves uploading documents to a secure data platform, manually searching for victim-related information, applying redactions, and then conducting an additional round of quality control by his office. In some cases, victims have also requested further removals or redactions after documents were inadvertently made public.
Clayton said feedback from the initial releases has prompted the Justice Department to adjust its procedures to better safeguard victim privacy.
Those changes include prioritising documents expected to be both responsive and non-duplicative, sorting records based on the likelihood that they contain victim information, and assigning specialised teams to review high-priority batches where such material is most likely to appear.
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