Department of Justice officials are facing threats of legal action after the department missed the Epstein Files Transparency Act's stated deadline to publish all its documents related to Jeffrey Epstein - but the law may lean in the DOJ's favor.
DOJ officials have continued to review and upload the files more than a week after the congressionally mandated Dec. 19 due date, spurring Democrats and some Republicans to call for a range of consequences, from contempt to civil litigation. The DOJ is, however, defending the drawn-out release process, suggesting that rushing to publish piles of unexamined material would also flout the law.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a recent interview on "Meet the Press" there was "well-settled law" that supported the DOJ missing the transparency bill's deadline because of a need to meet other legal requirements in the bill, like redacting victim-identifying information.
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The bill required the DOJ to withhold information about potential victims and material that could jeopardize open investigations or litigation. Officials could also leave out information "in the interest of national defense or foreign policy," the bill said, while keeping visible any details that could embarrass politically connected people.
Last week, the DOJ revealed that two of its components, the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, had just gathered and submitted more than 1 million additional pages of potentially responsive documents related to Epstein's and Ghislaine Maxwell's sex trafficking cases for review.
The "mass volume of material" could "take a few more weeks" to sift through, the DOJ said in a statement, adding that the department would "continue to fully comply with federal law and President Trump's direction to release the files."
Blanche notified Congress in a letter on Dec. 19 that new documents were still surfacing. The DOJ must, therefore, "publicly produce responsive documents on a rolling basis," Blanche said. The deputy attorney general said "rolling productions" aligned with court precedents that said laws like the transparency act cannot be interpreted to "[demand] the impossible."
The DOJ's concerns about page volume and redaction requirements also echo those frequently raised in similar litigation surrounding compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests, where courts have routinely stepped in to balance competing interests of parties in the cases rather than force compliance on an unrealistic timetable.
The conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch has seen mixed success over the years in bringing FOIA lawsuits, showcasing the court's role in mediating such disputes.
Judicial Watch brought several lawsuits against the government over Hillary Clinton's private email server scandal, leading a federal judge at one point to allow the conservative watchdog to move forward with questioning Clinton aides as part of a discovery process as it sought records on the matter. The decision was later reversed at the appellate court level.
In a separate case, the appellate court sided with Judicial Watch by reversing a lower court ruling as part of a longstanding legal battle the watchdog waged with the DOJ over obtaining Acting Attorney General Sally Yates' emails. The D.C. Circuit Court found that the DOJ could not withhold email attachments from Yates' account and ordered further review on the matter.
In the current controversy over the Epstein files, lawmakers are pressuring the DOJ by threatening a combination of political and legal remedies over the 30-day deadline and over what they view as excessive redactions.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., vowed to bring a resolution up for a vote when the Senate returns from the holidays that would direct the Senate to initiate a lawsuit against the DOJ for failing to comply with the transparency act's requirements.
"The law Congress passed is crystal clear: release the Epstein files in full, so Americans can see the truth," Schumer said. "Instead, the Trump Department of Justice dumped redactions and withheld the evidence - that breaks the law."
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Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who spearheaded the transparency bill, warned that they plan to pursue contempt proceedings against Attorney General Pam Bondi in light of the DOJ missing the deadline and making perceived over-redactions.
A group of mostly Democratic senators also called on the DOJ inspector general to investigate the department's compliance with the law.
The DOJ has maintained that releasing unreviewed documents would violate the law, saying last week that it had "lawyers working around the clock to review and make the legally required redactions."
