By Michael Koziol
Phoenix: The Trump administration is being accused of breaking the law and breaching public trust after it released only part of the so-called Epstein files after heavily redacting many of the documents on a dramatic day leading into the Christmas break.
Democrats and Republicans were threatening US Attorney-General Pam Bondi with impeachment or prosecution, while one Epstein survivor said the redactions were “obviously” made to protect rich and powerful men who had witnessed or participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.
A framed photograph of Epstein with a female on his lap, documented during a search of his home on Little Saint James island in 2019.Credit: AP
“This is not transparency,” congressman Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, said. “This is just more cover-up by Donald Trump and Pam Bondi.”
The Department of Justice made public thousands of documents related to its investigations into Epstein on Saturday (AEST) – the deadline to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by Congress and signed by Trump 30 days ago.
The documents, which were published about 4pm Friday, local time (8am Saturday AEDT) were contained in four downloadable zip files and were mostly in PDF format.
Among the documents was an FBI log from September 1996 showing the bureau received a complaint about Epstein’s predilection for child pornography nearly a decade before he was properly investigated for child sex offences, leading to his 2008 conviction.
The FBI note detailing a complaint made by Maria Farmer in 1996.Credit: US Justice Department
The complainant, Maria Farmer, had accused Epstein of stealing nude photos she had taken of her underage sisters for artistic purposes. On Saturday, she said that after 30 years she had finally been vindicated. “I can’t believe it. They can’t call me a liar any more,” she told The New York Times.
Photographs featured heavily in the disclosure, depicting Epstein’s glamorous globetrotting life with girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and the many wealthy and high-profile men he counted as friends.
One new photo showed then-Prince Andrew in a tuxedo lying across the laps of five women, with Maxwell standing behind them. Musicians Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger appeared in pictures with Epstein, as did businessmen Richard Branson and Bill Gates.
Sexual themes were common. In one photo, Epstein was holding a cake in the shape of a woman’s breasts, while other files depicted sex toys and receipts for books on erotica.
Jeffrey Epstein holds a cake in the shape of a woman’s breasts.Credit: AP
Former president Bill Clinton appeared in many files, including a photograph of him shirtless in a hot tub with a woman whose face had been redacted. “Beloved Democrat President. The black box is added to protect a victim,” Justice Department spokesman Gates McGavick said on X.
Clinton’s spokesman Angel Ureña distanced his boss from the saga. “The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever,” he said.
Trump rarely appeared in the files released Saturday, despite his friendship with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s. Trump says the pair fell out in that decade, and has always denied any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity.
The president avoided commenting on the Epstein matter on Friday, US time, and did not mention it when he addressed a rally in North Carolina on Friday night. He then flew to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for the Christmas holidays, without taking questions.
Bill Clinton is pictured in a hot tub with an unidentified woman.Credit: US Department of Justice
Among the heavily redacted files released on Saturday was a 100-page document that was entirely blacked out, and a 119-page grand jury transcript that was also completely redacted. Countless other photographs and written records were also redacted.
Democratic congressman Ro Khanna and Republican Thomas Massie, who led the charge in Congress to compel the files’ release, said they were drafting articles of impeachment and inherent contempt against Bondi, but had not decided whether to act on them.
“The most important documents are missing,” Khanna told CNN, citing a 60-page indictment before Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, and a related 82-page internal memo, which lawyers have previously indicated are in the files.
“We have not seen the draft indictment that implicates other rich and powerful men who were on Epstein’s rape island who either watched the abuse of young girls or participated in the abuse of young girls,” Khanna said.
Donald Trump leaves the White House on Friday for a rally in North Carolina, before heading to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.Credit: AP
Massie said the disclosure failed to comply with either the letter or spirit of the law, and it would be open to a future Justice Department to prosecute Bondi and others.
Earlier, deputy attorney-general Todd Blanche announced that while hundreds of thousands of files would be made public on Saturday, there were several hundred thousand more that he expected would be released over the next two weeks.
Part of the difficulty was protecting victims’ identities, he said. The Epstein Files Transparency Act allowed for personal information to be redacted, as well as any material that would jeopardise an ongoing investigation.
The partial release follows months of resistance by Trump, who views the ongoing public interest in Epstein’s connections with powerful figures – particularly Trump himself – as a distraction and a “Democrat hoax”.
One of the scrapbook pages mocking a young girl in the released files.Credit: US Justice Department
But Epstein’s victims say it is necessary to make the files public to achieve justice and potentially reveal new co-conspirators. Epstein died in jail in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges; Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Marina Lacerda told the BBC she and her fellow Epstein survivors were disappointed by the released material. “We feel that it is a lot of files that don’t have much information in them,” she said. “We can see some of these redactions were made obviously to protect, again, the wealthy and the rich and the powerful men.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration also moved to unseal documents related to an FBI investigation into would-be Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, whose bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a 2024 rally in Pennsylvania.
“President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in American history,” Bondi said in a post.
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