By Jack Phillips | December 24, 2024
The Department of Justice released nearly 30,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein documents Tuesday while preemptively dismissing “untrue and sensationalist claims” against President Donald Trump, including a debunked letter that purportedly showed Epstein praising Trump’s “love of young, nubile girls.”
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the DOJ stated on X Tuesday. “To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
The FBI confirmed the letter to former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was fake, noting it lacked Epstein’s inmate number and carried a Virginia postmark three days after his 2019 jailhouse death.
The release fulfills part of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated all records be produced by Dec. 19. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that hundreds of lawyers are reviewing documents to redact victims’ names, as required by the law.
The department also re-released 119 previously fully-redacted pages related to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, responding to media reports about blacked-out grand jury materials.
Congressional Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), have called for an investigation into the redactions, arguing the production “has fallen short of what the law clearly required.”
Maxwell is serving 20 years for sex trafficking; Epstein died in a New York jail cell in 2019, ruled a suicide.
Additional reporting by The Associated Press on the letter’s forensic details contributed to this article.
