On Friday, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released a heavily redacted fraction of the “Epstein files” in a politically calculated continuation of the decades-long coverup of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and his global network of wealthy and powerful co-conspirators.

News media reports said the DOJ posted approximately 10 percent of the records from the investigations into Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, drawn from its own records, the FBI, the Southern District of New York and other federal entities.

Legal experts say many of the documents are already publicly available from previous court disclosures. The latest documents are being released under the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by President Trump on November 19, which stipulates that they all will be released within 30 days.

The online DOJ portal aggregates “data sets,” including an evidence list and trial exhibits from US v. Maxwell, flight logs for Epstein’s private aircraft, a partially redacted “contact book,” and a “masseuse list,” alongside videos and transcripts from a two-day 2025 interview of Maxwell by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in Tallahassee, Florida.

Media commentary has emphasized that the law obliges the DOJ to disclose a broad range of categories, including bank records, witness interviews, internal memoranda and communications, and any material about “people, government entities or companies” connected to Epstein’s trafficking or financial networks.

Within this framework, the new tranche reportedly contains some internal records on the federal investigations in Florida and New York spanning more than a decade, although the extent to which the critical 2007 non-prosecution arrangement is illuminated remains contested.

The documents are riddled with redactions, especially where they concern victims, non-charged individuals, and the concrete operational details of Epstein’s trafficking apparatus. The DOJ’s public notice on its disclosure site explicitly announces that “redactions of victim names and other identifying information have been applied,” and that in audio files, the names of victims and other identifiers have been replaced with a steady tone.

The Transparency Act gives the department “wide latitude” to withhold information on several grounds: to protect victims’ identities and child sexual abuse material, to safeguard “open investigations or litigation,” and, most ominously, to exclude any material whose disclosure is deemed contrary to “national defense or foreign policy.”

Media reports have stressed that, while this language is presented as a protection for survivors, it also provides a sweeping legal pretext to remove names, financial trails, and communications that might implicate government agencies, intelligence-connected figures or foreign regimes.

U.S. Representative Thomas Massie (Republican-Kentucky), who was a leading sponsor of the Epstein Act, said Friday that the Justice Department is “grossly” violating its legal obligations.

Members of Congress have also noted that the DOJ is required by the Act to provide within 15 days a report explaining the rationale for any redactions and withholdings, including a list of “all government officials and politically exposed persons” referenced in the underlying files.

If such a report exists, it has not been made public, and even its promised list of “politically exposed persons” may itself be shaped by secret classification decisions and the doctrine of “national security,” which has repeatedly been invoked to shield the state’s relationship with Epstein from public scrutiny.

One significant document that has emerged is the child pornography complaint file by Maria Farmer on September 3, 1996. This document proves that the FBI received specific, credible warnings about Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of minors more than a decade before serious federal action was taken—and ignored them.

While her name is redacted, Farmer’s handwritten complaint details Epstein taking nude photos of her sisters (aged 16 and 12), stealing negatives, and threatening violence, flagging potential child pornography and coercion. Its release implicates the federal agency in a coverup, raising questions about the Justice Department’s 2007 intervention in the Epstein scandal as part of the systemic protection of the powerful over vulnerable teenage girls.

Speaking with the New York Times, Farmer said, “I’ve waited 30 years. I can’t believe it. They can’t call me a liar anymore.”

Additionally, the number of Epstein’s victims has now been confirmed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as 1,200 individuals. In his letter to Congress on Friday accompanying the initial release, Blanche acknowledged for the first time the scale of the Epstein sex trafficking and abuse operation, writing that the investigation “resulted in over 1,200 names being identified as victims or their relatives.”

Blanche, Trump’s legal confidant elevated to the number-two post at the DOJ, has emerged as the central public defender of the partial release. In an appearance on Fox News, Blanche said that the DOJ was releasing “several hundred thousand” documents, but admitted that this was not the entirety of the department’s holdings, promising “several hundred thousand more” pages in the coming weeks.

Blanche argued that the department was meeting what he called the “initial deadline” under the law, insisting that additional material would be posted as it was processed for redactions to “protect victims” and comply with other statutory limits.

Through the DOJ’s public affairs office, Blanche posted on the department’s official social media account:

The DOJ is releasing a massive tranche of new documents that the Biden and Obama administrations refused to release. The story here: the Trump administration is providing levels of transparency that prior administrations never even contemplated. The initial deadline is being met as we work diligently to protect victims.

However, the blatantly political motivation of the DOJ and Blanche is evident in the prominent placement of multiple new photos of Bill Clinton, while other individuals are redacted. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson posted one of the new photos on social media saying, “Here is Bill Clinton in a hot tub next to someone whose identity has been redacted,” and “Per the Epstein Files Transparency Act, DOJ was specifically instructed only to redact the faces of victims and/or minors. Time for the media to start asking real questions.”

In pursuit of their own political advantage, Democratic members of the House and Senate have accused the Justice Department of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by failing to release all the unclassified records. Of course, throughout the period in which the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of the Biden administration, they did nothing to expose the full extent of Epstein’s criminal enterprise or bring anyone to justice, and covered up their own role in facilitating it.

Attorneys representing Epstein’s victims have denounced the partial release as another betrayal, combining performative “disclosure” with the substantive preservation of impunity for those who financed, organized, and profited from the trafficking network. According to press reports, victim advocates in contact with House Democrats describe the DOJ’s decision to miss the deadline and then retroactively redefine it as an “initial” benchmark as “a clear violation of the law and of the survivors’ right to know why this was allowed to happen for so long.”

As for the 2007 non-prosecution agreement in Florida—where federal prosecutors, including then-US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alex Acosta, intervened to shield Epstein from the sex trafficking charges and ensure a sweetheart state plea—commentators have said that the Transparency Act specifically demands disclosure of “the details and legal rationale” for DOJ’s intervention.

However, early analyses of the new release indicate that while some internal communications and memoranda have surfaced, the key legal reasoning, high-level communications, and decision chains leading to the non-prosecution agreement remain either fully withheld or heavily redacted, raising immediate questions about statutory compliance.

Previous statements by victims’ lawyers in the wake of the August 2025 Maxwell transcript release accused the government of “dribbling out” information in a way that “maximizes political advantage while minimizing real transparency,” a method which is now being repeated.

Family members of victims, quoted in recent coverage, have pointed to the continuing omission of a full accounting of Epstein’s contacts and collaborators in Palm Beach, New York, Paris and the US Virgin Islands, regions where his abuse of underage girls was systematically organized and protected.

They note that the files so far add little to the list of already known names—politicians, billionaires, royals—while continuing to obscure the mechanisms by which law enforcement, intelligence agencies and financial institutions enabled Epstein’s operations and then closed ranks after his death in custody.

The new document dump—which has been framed by Trump, Blanche and the DOJ as an unprecedented gesture of transparency—is the latest stage in a protracted coverup of Epstein’s criminal operation and the layer of the financial and political elite that participated in and benefited from it.

Even now, more than six years after Epstein’s death in a federal jail under suspicious circumstances, and decades after his abuses began, the state is invoking “ongoing investigations,” “victim protection,” and “national security” to maintain a regime of secrecy over the most sensitive aspects of his network.

As previous analysis on the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the conflicts within the American ruling class over how much of the Epstein story to reveal are driven entirely by considerations of factional advantage, not by a desire to expose the truth about what occurred over decades in Palm Beach, New York, Paris and the US Virgin Islands.

The selective, heavily redacted nature of the so‑called Epstein files confirms the WSWS assessment: Even when compelled by law to disclose, the state has responded by carefully curating what becomes public, preserving deniability for institutions whose legitimacy is already deeply corroded.

The pervasive depravity, corruption and indifference to human life manifested in cases like Epstein’s are not aberrations but expressions of the advanced degeneration of American capitalism and its ruling establishment.

The Epstein affair exposes the intertwining of the financial oligarchy, the intelligence agencies, the courts and both major parties in crimes against the most vulnerable, and the December 19 release stands as further proof that no section of this class can or will provide a genuine reckoning with those crimes.