Attorney General Pam Bondi admitted mistakes were made in the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, particularly on the redactions of victims’ names.
Approximately 7,000 documents of the 3.5 million released have been flagged for further review based on concerns from victims, Bondi revealed in a letter to federal judges.
Because of the errors, the Justice Department “has temporarily removed thousands of documents from the DOJ Epstein Library for further review — including approximately 9,500 documents subject to the Protective Orders in the Maxwell case,” she wrote.
Follow the New York Post’s live updates of Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison sentencing.
Ghislaine Maxwell was separately prosecuted by the Southern District of New York. She is serving a 20-year federal sentence for charges tied to sex trafficking.
Maxwell pleaded the Fifth in video testimony with the House Oversight Committee on Monday.
The Justice Department has been under scrutiny for its handling of the release. Observers noted that some files disappeared after they were posted publicly online last week.
The tranche of documents revealed the names of women who had not previously been named publicly, leading to criticism from victims’ rights groups.
Bondi blamed several factors for the errors, including human errors, technical errors, and the DOJ staff being hampered by their inability to search the text of certain documents that were part of the cache.
She noted that victims and their lawyers have found “new victims and new identifiers (such as nicknames, email addresses, and family names)” contained in the documents.
Justice Department personnel are “working around the clock to run additional searches for documents that may require additional redaction.”
Congress passed a law in November requiring the Justice Department to release all unclassified records within 30 days. It also required the victims’ information to be redacted.
DOJ missed the original 30-day deadline, and the release came six weeks later.
However, names and other identifying information of victims were found scattered throughout the documents.
Here’s the latest on the release of the Epstein files
Annie Farmer, an Epstein victim who has become an advocate, was fiercely critical of the Justice Department’s handling of the redactions.
“If you see some of these documents where there will be a list of 50 names and one is redacted, you know, there’s just no explanation for how it could have been done so poorly,” Farmer told NPR.
Bondi wrote the letter to judges in the Southern District of New York in response to legal concerns from the victims. A court hearing on the issue that was scheduled in New York for Wednesday has been cancelled, with a judge saying that the victims and the DOJ had been able to resolve the privacy issues.
But the work continues.
“The Department has made, and continues to make, substantial progress in identifying, reviewing, and redacting potential victim-identifying information both independently and in coordination with victims and their counsel,” she wrote.