The United States Justice Department faces a Friday deadline to release a massive trove of documents from its investigations into the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, after Congress overwhelmingly approved a new law forcing their disclosure last month.
According to Reuters, that legislation followed months of political wrangling as well as rebellion by some of Trump’s staunchest supporters over his administration’s months-long reluctance to make the records public.
It remains unclear how, or when, the files will be released on Friday, but they will likely not represent all unclassified records held by the agency.
The law allowed the Justice Department to withhold personal information about Epstein’s victims as well as any material that would jeopardize an active investigation.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News that the department will release hundreds of thousands of documents on Friday, but not the entire cache of files relating to Epstein.
“I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today several hundred thousand and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said.
“There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”
The failure to produce all of the documents by the Friday deadline could mean the administration will run afoul of the law requiring disclosure, although the penalty for that is unclear.
