President Donald Trump signed a bill into law on Wednesday to release documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, but an exact timeline is murky.
After a monthslong battle and obvious annoyance, Trump finally relented this week and approved Republicans voting in favor of the bill introduced by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). In a post on Truth Social after signing the bill, Trump boasted that, “This latest Hoax will backfire on the Democrats just as all of the rest have!”
Timeline for release
After Trump’s signature, within 30 days the Department of Justice must make “publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices, that relate to Jeffrey Epstein including all investigations, prosecutions, or custodial matters.”
Given that the president signed the bill on Wednesday, the official deadline for the release is Dec. 19.
The timeline could further be complicated by provisions in the bill that allow some redactions, primarily information that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary,” and any material that “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” of victims or “depicts or contains child sexual abuse.”
For any information the DOJ wants to redact, it must outline its justification for doing so within 15 days of its public release.
Every House Republican, bar one, votes to release Epstein files
A July memo from the FBI and DOJ said the departments carried out an “exhaustive” search for all documents related to Epstein, conducting “digital searches of its databases, hard drives, and network drives as well as physical searches of squad areas, locked cabinets, desks, closets, and other areas where responsive material may have been stored.”
Altogether, the agencies concluded that they had over 300 gigabytes of material, including “ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography.” The memo further concluded that over 1,000 victims were involved.
Given that teams of “agents, analysts, attorneys, and privacy and civil liberties experts” have already combed through the documents, the DOJ needs only to issue proper redactions before releasing them.
Redacted information would ‘add fuel to the fire’
Despite Attorney General Pam Bondi’s commitment to follow through, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are skeptical. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) argued against the provision that allows for redactions during an active investigation.
“People who feel very strongly about this will feel like they’ve been duped” if the DOJ claims “we can’t release anything because we have an active investigation,” she said, the Hill reported.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said he was okay with the withholding due to the ongoing investigations provision, but that “if you do a blanket hold, I think that they’re going to have a lot of people angry,” he said.
“I think they would do well to figure how to release as much as possible and then have a very well-articulated reason for that which they can’t,” Tillis added. “It would add fuel to the fire if they don’t produce something meaningful.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) was more confident but provided a dynamic timeline of the release schedule, stating that they would be released in waves rather than all at once.
“I fully expect the Justice Department to release all the documents. It will take a while, but I believe they’ve started on it right now,” he said. “I’m hoping we’ll see the first tranche” of documents “after Thanksgiving.”
Democrats were far less charitable, with many suggesting that Bondi would try to delay the release and use other methods to prevent the documents’ release.
“This is Pam Bondi. She works for Trump. This is all a setup. Trump fought to the end to resist release. He lost. Do I believe he’s had a real conversion? No. He anticipated the outcome and then ordered Bondi to begin other investigations so we’ll be seeing the Justice Department withholding information because it might interfere with ongoing investigations,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) said.
Democratic leaders were even more blunt.
“I just had a meeting of 10 senators to discuss this — we got to make sure we get all of the Epstein files, all. They can’t f*** around with this,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said earlier this week.
SCHUMER SAYS TRUMP DOJ CAN’T ‘F*** AROUND’ IN RELEASING EPSTEIN FILES: ‘I DON’T TRUST BONDI’
“They can’t say, ‘Oh, we’ll give you this but there are legal reasons we can’t give you that,’ and we are going to be pursuing them relentlessly to get everything because I don’t trust this administration. I don’t trust [Attorney General Pam] Bondi. I don’t trust [FBI Director] Kash Patel. I don’t trust the president. And they could screw around with this. It will be all of our jobs to be on them and make sure that we get everything,” he added.
Bondi noted on Wednesday that the DOJ has already released over 33,000 documents related to Epstein to Congress.