Lawsuit alleges DoJ broke transparency law by withholding records on Jeffrey Epstein and over-redacting disclosures
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, engaged in a “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation” of a law requiring the Department of Justiceto release the entirety of the so-called Epstein files,a lawsuitfiled in Washington DC alleges.
The action on Monday by Katie Phang, an investigative journalist and legal analyst, seeks to hold Blanche personally responsible for the justice department’s alleged failure to publish all the documents the government holds about Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender. A full release was mandated by a landmark transparency actpassed by Congressin November, with a deadline of 19 December 2025.
Blanche, who was the deputy attorney general until Pam Bondiwas firedearlier this month, has since been accused of stalling the process and releasing only a fraction of the papers. The scandal has been hugely damaging to the White House in part because of Donald Trump’s former relationship with the disgraced financier.
In February, Democrats said millions of documents were still being withheld, and accused the justice department of a “full-blown cover up” after Blanche in effect declared the investigation over, following what he said at the time was a final release of about 3m previously unseen papers.
In a separate development last week, the justice department’s office of the inspector general (OIG) said it was launching its ownauditinto the department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Epstein died in prison by suicide in New York in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. His “fixer”, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving a20-year prison termafter her December 2021 conviction on similar charges.
Phang’s lawsuit, filed in federal court on Monday in the US district court for the District of Columbia, names Blanche as the defendant and alleges misconduct on several levels. It accuses Blanche of missing statutory deadlines for document production, improper or excessive redactions, failure to explain redactions as required by law, and withholding or retracting key documents after release.
Blanche has argued that redactions were necessary in many places to prevent the inadvertent identification of numerous of Epstein’s victims, many of them minors, and has conceded that “mistakes are inevitable”.
Many Epstein victims havecomplainedthat their sensitive personal information was improperly exposed in the releases.
Critics, meanwhile, questioned the process by which the justice department determined which papers to withhold, and which redactions to make. “There were tons of completely unnecessary redactions, in addition to the failure to redact the names of victims, and so that was troubling to us,” Jamie Raskin, the Democratic ranking member of the House judiciary committee,told reportersin February after viewing some of the justice department’s most recent release.
Phang, a reporter with MeidasTouch, wants the court to declare the Department of Justice in violation of the law, order the release of all required documents without unlawful redactions, and provide an explanation for any remaining redactions.
The lawsuit also seeks the appointment of an independent special master from outside the department to oversee compliance by the justice department with the Epstein act.
“The DoJ’s actions have directly harmed her ability to report on Epstein’s network and the government’s handling of the case,” according toan articleannouncing the lawsuit on the website of Phang’s employers.
“As a journalist who has extensively covered Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, she contends that incomplete and improperly redacted records undermine both her work and the public’s right to transparency.”
