Department of Justice Outrage over officials' handling of disclosures

The release of about 3m Jeffrey Epstein files has failed to quell outrage over US justice department officials' handling of the disclosures, with advocates claiming that potentially millions of documents are still being withheld.

- Victoria Bekiempis

The Department of Justice was required to disclose all investigative files by 19 December under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. While the department did release some documents on that date, last week's disclosure came nearly six weeks after this deadline.

The deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who served as Trump's criminal defence lawyer, told reporters last week that this disclosure marked "the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance with the act".

"After submitting the final report to Congress as required under the act and publishing the written. justifications for redactions in the Federal Register, the department's obligations under the act will be completed," Blanche said.

He said while the justice department had found "more than 6m pages being identified as potentially responsive" that was because "we erred on the side of over-collection of materials from various sources to best ensure maximum transparency".

"The number of responsive pages is significantly smaller than the total number of pages initially collected," Blanche added. "That's why I mentioned a moment ago we're releasing more than 3m pages today and not the 6m pages that we collected."