The Justice Department on Friday released many more records from its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, resuming disclosures under a law intended to reveal what the government knew about the millionaire financier’s sexual abuse of young girls and his interactions with rich and powerful people such as Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department would be releasing more than 3 million pages of documents along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The files, posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release in December.
Included were documents concerning some of Mr. Epstein’s famous associates, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Britain’s Prince Andrew, and email correspondence between Mr. Epstein and Elon Musk and other prominent contacts from across the political spectrum.
The documents were disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law enacted after months of public and political pressure that requires the government to open its files on the late financier and his confidant and onetime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Lawmakers complained when the Justice Department made only a limited release last month, but officials said more time was needed to review additional documents that were discovered and to ensure no sensitive information about victims was released.
Friday’s disclosure represents the largest document dump to date about a saga the Trump administration has struggled to shake because of the president’s previous association with Mr. Epstein.
Criminal investigations into the financier have long animated online sleuths, conspiracy theorists, and others who have suspected government cover-ups and clamored for a full accounting, demands that Mr. Blanche acknowledged might not be satisfied by the latest release.
“There’s a hunger, or a thirst, for information that I don’t think will be satisfied by the review of these documents,” he said.
After missing a Dec. 19 deadline set by Congress to release all the files, the Justice Department said it tasked hundreds of lawyers with reviewing the records to determine what needed to be redacted, or blacked out. It denied any effort to shield Mr. Trump, who says he cut ties with Mr. Epstein years ago after an earlier friendship, from potential embarrassment.
The latest batch includes correspondence either with or about some of Mr. Epstein’s friends. The records have thousands of references to Mr. Trump, including emails in which Mr. Epstein and others shared news articles about him, commented on his policies or politics, or gossiped about him and his family.
Also included was a spreadsheet created last August summarizing calls to the FBI’s National Threat Operation Center or to a hotline established by prosecutors from people claiming without corroboration to have some knowledge of wrongdoing by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Epstein killed himself in a New York jail cell in August 2019, a month after being indicted on federal sex trafficking charges. In 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite, of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of his underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
U.S. prosecutors never charged anyone else in connection with Mr. Epstein’s abuse of girls. One victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, accused him in lawsuits of having arranged for her to have sexual encounters at age 17 and 18 with numerous politicians, business titans, academics, and others. They all denied her allegations.
This story was reported by The Associated Press.
