Deadline to release Epstein files looms after years of conspiracy theories

The deadline for the US Department of Justice to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein is now just hours away.

Donald Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law last month after bowing to political pressure from fellow Republicans as well as Democrats.

The release of the files has long been demanded by a public outraged at Epstein’s abuse of young women and underage girls and hungry to learn what his rich and powerful associates knew about it.

Recent polling suggests just 44% of American adults identifying as Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of the Epstein issue, compared with his 82% approval rate with the same group.

Anything less than the full, unredacted release of all the Epstein files will likely leave the president’s supporters unsatisfied.

The deadline comes after Democrats released the latest tranche of photos from the paedophile financier’s estate.

Images released yesterday show close-ups of sentences from ‘Lolita’, a book about a man’s obsession with a 12-year-old girl, scribbled across a female’s body — chest, foot, neck and back.

The 68 photos are among some 95,000 that Epstein’s estate released to the House Oversight Committee. 

Democrats said they had thousands more images, ‘both graphic and mundane’, which they are continuing to analyse.

The images ‘were selected to provide the public with transparency into a representative sample of the photos’ and ‘to provide insights into Epstein’s network and his extremely disturbing activities’, they said.

Last week, oversight Democrats released 19 photos, including some featuring now-President Donald Trump, who dismissed the images as ‘no big deal’.

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates, professor and political activist Noam Chomsky and former Trump aide Steve Bannon also feature in the latest images.

There are no captions or context accompanying the photos and individuals’ presence in them is not proof of any wrongdoing.

What does the Epstein Files Transparency Act allow?

The law allows for redactions about victims or ongoing investigations but makes clear no records should be withheld or redacted due to ‘embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity’.

Reports have emerged of growing frustration within the justice department as it races to redact thousands of documents with little guidance.

A source told CNN that each attorney in its national security division has been processing more than 1,000 documents since Thanksgiving week.

They said some are nervous about the potential for mistakes – including the exposure of personal information – given the tight turnaround time.

In July, Trump dismissed some of his own supporters as ‘weaklings’ for falling for what he called ‘the Jeffrey Epstein hoax’.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the latest release changes nothing.

‘President Trump has been consistently calling for transparency related to the Epstein files and his administration has delivered’, she said in a statement.

The Epstein investigations

Police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein in 2005 after the family of a 14-year-old girl reported she had been molested at his mansion.

The FBI joined the investigation, and authorities gathered testimony from multiple underage girls who said they had been hired to give Epstein sexual massages.

Ultimately, though, prosecutors gave Epstein a deal that allowed him to avoid federal prosecution.

He pleaded guilty to state prostitution charges involving someone under age 18 and was sentenced to just 18 months in jail.

Epstein’s accusers then spent years in civil litigation trying to get that plea deal set aside.

One of those women, Virginia Giuffre, accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters, starting at age 17, with numerous other men, including billionaires, famous academics, US politicians and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew.

All of those men denied the allegations.

Prosecutors never brought charges in connection with Giuffre’s claims, but her account fuelled conspiracy theories about supposed government plots to protect the powerful.

Giuffre died by suicide at her farm in Western Australia in April at age 41.

Federal prosecutors in New York brought new sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019, but he killed himself in jail a month after his arrest.

Prosecutors then charged Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, with recruiting underage girls for Epstein to abuse.

Maxwell was convicted in late 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence, though she was moved from a low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas after she was interviewed over the summer by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Her lawyers argued that she never should have been tried or convicted.

The Justice Department in July said it had not found any information that could support prosecuting anyone else.

Scores of Epstein records were already public

Flight logs, address books, email correspondence, police reports, grand jury records, courtroom testimony and transcripts of depositions of his accusers, his staffers and others have long been in the public domain following nearly two decades of court cases and prying by reporters.

Yet the public’s appetite for more records has been insatiable, particularly for anything related to Epstein’s associations with famous people including Trump, Mountbatten-Windsor and Clinton.

Trump was friends with Epstein for years before the two had a falling-out.

Neither he nor Clinton has ever been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and again, the mere inclusion of someone’s name in files from the investigation does not imply otherwise.

Mountbatten-Windsor denied ever having met Giuffre, but King Charles stripped him of his royal titles this year after her posthumous memoir was published.

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