The Justice Department has begun the process of restoring tens of thousands of records tied to the federal investigation into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein after officials acknowledged errors in their review and explained why a large batch of documents had been temporarily removed from the public archive.
A senior DOJ official said 47,635 files were taken offline for review from a larger batch of roughly 60,000 pages that the department pulled due to sensitive content that needed redactions.
The official said the batch was taken down after researchers and members of the public flagged instances of unredacted nudity, including some material that appeared to contain commercial pornography, prompting the department to remove the files and conduct another round of redactions before restoring them.
DOJ officials have said the large batch of files was never intended to be deleted permanently and would be reposted once the review process is complete.
The records are part of the massive archive released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the government to disclose most investigative materials tied to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
So far, the department has released roughly 3.5 million of the approximately 6 million pages of Epstein-related records in its possession. Officials say the remaining offline records contain material that is impermissible to upload, such as sexually explicit or pornographic images, attorney-client privileged materials, or items that are duplicative. Through an established reading room set up at the DOJ headquarters, members of Congress are permitted to access all duplicate files.
Separately, the DOJ confirmed Thursday that at least 20 documents had been missing from the database due to coding errors during the review process.
According to the department, 16 documents — including FBI “Form 302” interview summaries — were mistakenly coded as “duplicative” during the initial review of the archive. Those materials included additional interview summaries tied to a woman who made allegations involving President Donald Trump.
The latest documents released described a series of interviews agents conducted in 2019 after Epstein’s arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.
In the interviews, a woman alleged that both Epstein and Trump assaulted her in the 1980s when she was a teenager. The claims have not been corroborated. Trump has denied wrongdoing and previously claimed the Epstein documents “totally exonerated” him.
DOJ reviewers of the Epstein files initially believed the additional interview summaries had already been released elsewhere in the files. But after outside researchers raised concerns about missing records, officials reviewed documents with similar coding and discovered that 15 files related to the woman’s account had been incorrectly labeled duplicates.
The department also said federal prosecutors in Florida identified five prosecution memoranda that had initially been marked privileged but could be released with redactions protecting sensitive legal material.
As we said a week ago, the Department of Justice reviewed public allegations that 302 documents originally produced to Ghislaine Maxwell in discovery of her criminal case were missing from the EFTA library. As we have consistently done, if any member of the public reported… https://t.co/y7snlxbT0K
— DOJ Rapid Response (@DOJRR47) March 5, 2026
All 20 of those documents have now been published in the DOJ’s Epstein document library, according to a post by the DOJ’s Rapid Response Account.
A senior DOJ official acknowledged that “some mistakes were made” during the initial review process following passage of the transparency law, which forced the release of millions of pages of investigative records gathered during federal inquiries into Epstein and Maxwell. However, the official was emphatic that the department got it “99% right,” with the remaining “1%” attributed to mistakes that were overlooked due to occasional misspelling of names or mislabeling of files.
When pressed by the Washington Examiner on whether evidence contained in the files lends credibility to the broader conspiracy narrative that Epstein was leading a global sex trafficking ring for the purposes of gaining blackmail on elite individuals, the official said investigators have found no evidence that Epstein operated a blackmail scheme involving secret recordings of powerful figures.
The official also acknowledged that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York still has an open investigation, but they stressed that investigations of existing files have already been done and that U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton’s office remains on standby if any possible victims come forward with new allegations.
The rollout of Epstein records has drawn immense scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers say they are continuing to review the millions of pages already released.
Additionally, the latest release of records comes just two days after the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by a Republican majority, voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi Wednesday to testify about the Justice Department’s handling of the disclosures. An official said Thursday that it was not clear whether Bondi had yet received the subpoena papers.
White House Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has appeared in the Epstein files and maintains he has no connections to the disgraced financier’s crimes, has also agreed to testify before the committee.
Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in a recent interview with News Nation that investigators are pressing the department to reduce the number of fully redacted pages and clarify how some individuals in the files were categorized.
DOJ PUBLISHES MORE EPSTEIN DOCUMENTS MENTIONING TRUMP AFTER INITIAL OMISSION
“We have some disagreement over some of the names that are redacted, because we believe that in this investigation, there are some women who are both victims and victimizers,” Comer said. “We feel like those names could offer some helpful information to us in this investigation, as to figure out how Epstein was able to pull it off.”
Additional testimony tied to the congressional inquiry is expected in the coming weeks, including a Wednesday appearance by Epstein’s former accountant Richard Kahn and a March 19 deposition from longtime Epstein lawyer Darren Indyke.