Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche hit back against mounting public outcry after the Department of Justice blew through a legally mandated deadline to release remaining case files on the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.
“It’s very simple and very clear. The statute also requires us to protect victims,” Blanche, who is also Donald Trump’s former defense attorney, told NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday of the department’s failure to meet the Friday cutoff.
“The reason why we’re still reviewing documents and still continuing our process is simply that: to protect victims,” he went on. “So the same individuals that are out there complaining about the lack of documents that were produced on Friday are the same individuals who apparently don’t want us to protect victims.”
Blanche’s comments had been pre-emptively undercut when news broke earlier in the morning that the Justice Department had failed to redact an Epstein survivor’s name from one of the documents released Friday, thereby publicly identifying her.
That incident follows a series of embarrassments for the department this weekend. On Saturday, Blanche and the DOJ’s comments about the release of the files on X were bombarded with community notes. Social media fact-checking pointed out contradictions between the language of the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the DOJ’s statements.
Trump has repeatedly fuelled conspiracy theories, popular among his supporters, that Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, both former friends of the president, were members of an international pedophilic cabal.
His campaign promises of full disclosure on the disgraced financier’s crimes backfired in July. At that time, the Justice Department determined Epstein’s 2019 death in police custody was a suicide and that he kept no “client list” of accomplices, actively contradicting the same rumors to which Trump lent credence last year.
After facing intense scrutiny of his own relationship with Epstein, Trump signed a bipartisan law earlier in November mandating the release of all remaining documents on the case, subject to redactions only for the purposes of protecting victims’ identities.
The deadline for releasing those documents passed on Friday. As of Sunday, the DOJ has released only 3,900 files—a small fraction of the total number believed to be in its possession.
Critics have taken the delay as a sign that the DOJ may now be scrambling to redact embarrassing or potentially incriminating details of Trump’s relationship with Epstein rather than ensuring survivors remain anonymous.
Those concerns were further buoyed after the department appeared to unpublish on Saturday images of a desk drawer that contained pictures of the president.
“You can see in that photo there are photographs of women,” Blanche explained to NBC on Sunday. “We learned after it released that there were concerns about those women.”
Host Kristin Welker was quick to question whether that would suggest any of the women featured beside Trump in the photo were victims of the Epstein sex trafficking conspiracy.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Blanche backtracked.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
