Tens of thousands of documents that appeared to be from the Epstein files were briefly posted on the Justice Department’s website Monday before disappearing without explanation.
The documents reviewed by POLITICO were available to download through a Justice.gov link early Monday afternoon and remained available for several hours. The link was not visible on the Justice Department’s website where officials have been posting documents from the files it is required to disclose under a law passed by Congress last month. But the URL corresponded with an anticipated eighth “dataset” of documents that officials were expected to release.
That dataset appeared to be next in the sequence of documents that the Justice Department began releasing on Friday pertaining to the decades-long investigation and prosecution of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell for a sprawling sex trafficking operation.
Justice Department spokespeople didn’t respond to POLITICO’s requests for comment on the new documents. The material included tens of thousands of government documents and emails, as well as several dozen videos from the Bureau of Prisons.
The materials describe 2008 negotiations between the Justice Department and lawyers for Epstein as he attempted to settle claims that he trafficked girls. They include internal 2019 deliberations by the Justice Department and federal prosecutors in New York as they neared criminal charges against Epstein over his trafficking ring.
The records show prosecutors’ attempts to trace Epstein’s vast financial empire and far-flung properties, his ties to prominent financial industry executives and records of investigators’ efforts to track the movements of Epstein and Maxwell. They also catalogue the internal deliberations of Justice Department officials — whose identities are largely redacted — as they dealt with the internal demands and pressures from superiors related to the Epstein probe.
And they show how prosecutors pivoted from the shock of Epstein’s 2019 suicide in jail while he awaited trial to pursuing his co-conspirators.
Members of Congress who demanded the release of the Epstein files — and helped overwhelmingly pass a law this year requiring the Trump administration to publicly disclose them — have accused the Justice Department of breaking the law by failing to release the complete set by a Dec. 19 deadline. DOJ has vowed to release the documents on a rolling basis over the next few weeks. The documents posted and then removed from the DOJ website Monday paint the clearest picture yet of prosecutors’ efforts to amass evidence against Epstein.
After Epstein’s August, 2019 death, prosecutors produced a seven-page memo on co-conspirators they might consider charging and followed that with an 86-page update in December, according to the files. They also produced a 13-page memo of corporate prosecutions they might pursue and a 26-page memo regarding another target prosecutors considered pursuing.
Only references to the memos — not the documents themselves — appeared in the tranche temporarily published Monday. If eventually made public, the memos could show the calculations prosecutors made about whether to charge people associated with the sex-trafficking operation.
Prosecutors ultimately charged only Epstein and Maxwell.
