Attorney General Pam Bondi has appealed for even more time to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, having blown the original deadline set by Congress.
Bondi and her underlings in the Justice Department had been poring over millions of files, from physical documents to audio recordings, to meet a December deadline required by a bipartisan new law, rubber-stamped by President Donald Trump himself.
They failed, however. And Bondi has now said the American public will need to wait even longer. Department leaders said in a court filing on Tuesday that they expect a new release “in the near term,” but could not put a date on it.
“The Department has reviewed millions of pages of materials,” the filing stated, but despite “substantial progress,” it “is not able to provide a specific date at this time.”
The filing came in the form of a letter sent to Judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer in the Southern District of New York.
Despite blazing past the Dec. 19 deadline, it included what appear to be excuses. “The Department...cautions that its ongoing processes, including its quality control checks and document management system preparations, may require additional efforts to ensure the protection of victim identifying information while complying with the broad demands of the Act,” the letter said.
The speed of delivery is bogged down because of “manual review by hundreds of Department attorneys, agents and others.”
The files, made up of “more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence,” according to a July 2025 FBI memo, emanate from two major investigations into the pedophile financier, whose 2019 death in prison was ruled a suicide.
The Justice Department conceded earlier this month that it had released less than 1 percent of its Epstein-related files, with more than 2 million documents still in review. Given this concession, Bondi’s suggestion of a “near-term” release could be unlikely.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that nearly all of the 200 lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York were involved in the Epstein files review, with prosecutors pulled in from other cases to help. Among them were lawyers involved in the case against Nicolás Maduro, the abducted Venezuelan president facing narco-terrorism charges in Manhattan.
The letter, signed by Bondi, her deputy, Todd Blanche, and Jay Clayton, the Southern District’s U.S. attorney, was submitted to the federal judges who oversaw the cases of Epstein and his jailed accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
The delays, meanwhile, have led to criticism in Congress and beyond. Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who co-sponsored the “Epstein Transparency Act,” have accused the department of a “flagrant violation” of the new law by failing to meet the deadline.
The American public, too, is irked. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS between Jan. 9 and 12 found that two-thirds of Americans believe that the government is holding back information deliberately. Just 16 percent said Bondi et al are making an effort to release all information possible at this time.
The DOJ has been contacted for comment.
