The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday released thousands of heavily redacted documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that make only passing mention of President Donald Trump. They do, however, heavily feature former Democratic President Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, photos and documents related to Trump have surfaced in public for years from previous Epstein administrations. His name, for example, was on passenger lists on the financier's private jet that were part of the first batch of materials released by the Justice Department in February.
The partial disclosure was supposed to comply with a law that Congress overwhelmingly approved in November. All of Epstein's files were to be made available to the public, despite months of efforts by a Republican president to conceal them.
Declassified but cleared
It was not immediately clear how substantial the new materials were, as many documents related to the criminal have been made public before - after his death in prison in 2019.
Many of the files have been heavily redacted - several documents with 100 or more pages have been blacked out entirely - and the Justice Department admits it is still reviewing hundreds of thousands of additional pages.
The materials included evidence from several predator investigations, along with photographs of Clinton, whom Republicans have long despised.
However, they appear to have contained few or no photos of Trump or documents mentioning him, despite Trump and Epstein's well-publicised friendship in the 1990s and early 2000s, before they fell out in 2008.
The Justice Department is currently trying to draw attention to former President Clinton, with two spokespeople posting photos of him with alleged victims on social media.
Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Angel Urena, noted in a statement that the White House is trying to "shield" itself from scrutiny by targeting the former president. "They can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this is not about Bill Clinton," he writes.
Trump last month ordered the Justice Department to investigate Clinton's ties, which critics see as an effort to distract from his own relationship with Epstein.
In the images released Friday, the former president is seen in a swimming pool with Maxwell and another person whose face is blackened. In another shot, he is seen in a hot tub with another person whose face is blackened. Clinton has previously expressed regret for associating with the late felon and said he is not aware of any criminal activity.
Frustrated voters
In a statement, the White House did not fail to note that the release of the documents demonstrated its transparency and commitment to justice for the victims of Epstein's crime and criticized previous Democratic administrations for failing to do the same.
But the statement ignored that the declassification followed only after Congress pressed the administration to act, as Trump officials said earlier this year that no further files would be made available.
Currently, however, some lawmakers are criticizing the administration for not releasing everything. "This set of heavily redacted documents released by the Justice Department on Friday is only a fraction of the total body of evidence," noted Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, the driving force behind the legislation, wrote on X that Friday's release "grossly violates both the spirit and the letter of the law."
The disclosure law required the Justice Department to turn over information about how it handled the Epstein investigation, including internal memos and emails. None of that material appears to have been in the set of documents the government released Friday.
But many Trump voters have accused his administration of concealing Epstein's ties to influential figures and obfuscating details surrounding his death in a Manhattan jail, where he was awaiting trial on charges of human trafficking and abuse of underage girls.
According to a recent poll by Reuters and Ipsos, only 44 percent of American adults who consider themselves Republicans approve of the president's handling of the case.
(reuters, max)