The Justice Department's report to Congress under the Epstein Files Transparency Act was written on 14 February, and it reached the Federal Register this morning
The letter was written on 14 February.
It reached the public on Thursday, six pages of it, printed in the back of the Federal Register at 91 FR 55356 under the title Report Under Public Law 119-38. Public Law 119-38 is the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and Section 3 of it requires the Justice Department, within fifteen days of finishing the release the Act ordered, to tell the House and Senate Judiciary Committees three things: every category of record it let out, every category it held back with the legal basis, and the name of every government official and politically exposed person appearing anywhere in what it released.
The report is that letter. It is addressed to Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin at the Senate Judiciary Committee and to Jim Jordan and Jamie Raskin at the House committee, and it is signed by Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. The Federal Register notice carrying it is dated 21 August and signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr.
Neither document explains the six months in between, so this one does not either.
What was released, and the one thing that was not
The Department says it released everything in its possession relating to any of nine things: Epstein himself, including investigations, prosecutions and custodial matters; Ghislaine Maxwell; flight logs and travel records for any aircraft, vessel or vehicle he owned, operated or used; individuals named or referenced in connection with his criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements; corporate, nonprofit, academic and governmental entities with known or alleged ties to his trafficking or financial networks; immunity deals, non-prosecution agreements, plea bargains and sealed agreements; internal Justice Department communications about decisions to charge, not charge, investigate or decline to investigate; communications and metadata concerning the destruction, deletion, alteration or concealment of documents related to him, his associates, his detention and his death; and documentation of that detention and death, including the autopsy.
Only one category was withheld. Where material protected by privilege could not be separated from material the Act required to be released, the whole record stayed in. The privileges are named: deliberative process, attorney work product, attorney client.
Two sentences in the report are worth more than the rest of it. The first says that no records were withheld or redacted, in the Act's own words, on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary. The second says that although the Act permitted the Department to withhold properly classified national security material, it did not do so. Nothing was held back as classified.
Redactions were made on four grounds, all of them narrow: victim identifying information and medical files, child sexual abuse material, material that would jeopardise an active investigation, and images of death or injury. Unredacted copies sit at the Department for members of Congress to read, and the report says some have come in and read them.
The list
The last three pages are names, set in three columns, running alphabetically across each row. This desk counts 305 of them. The Department publishes no total, so that figure is a count of the printed rows and is offered as such.
Money & World is not reproducing the list, and the reason is in the report itself.
The Act never defined politically exposed person. Reviewers were told to note every government official and politically exposed person named or referenced in any document they read, including videos and images, and a person went on the list if that name turned up once. The Department then wrote the caveat down in plain terms: names appear in a wide variety of contexts, some individuals had extensive direct email contact with Epstein or Maxwell, and other individuals are mentioned only in a portion of a document, including press reporting, that on its face is unrelated to the Epstein and Maxwell matters.
Read the pages and that stops being a lawyer's hedge. Elvis Presley is on the list. So are Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin. Alongside them sit serving United States senators, attorneys general and cabinet secretaries from administrations reaching back to the 1990s, current and former heads of foreign governments, members of royal families living and dead, and several hundred more. The report does not say which of its two examples any given name falls under, and neither does this brief. A footnote adds that anyone whose name was redacted for law enforcement reasons is not on the list at all, and that omissions are unintentional and a function of how fast the Department worked.
A list assembled on that rule is a record of a search, not a finding about a person. Publishing it as though it were the second is how a name becomes an accusation without anybody having made one.
One more thing about the file
The six pages are scanned images. Extract the text of the official PDF and you get the covering paragraphs, the running heads and nothing else, because the report itself was filed as pictures of paper. It cannot be searched. A screen reader cannot read it, and the names in it cannot be copied out without retyping them or running the images through recognition software.
The Act asked for a report to Congress. It got one. The version the public gets is a photograph of it.
