Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was adamant Sunday that none of the redactions in the files on late sex predator Jeffrey Epstein were made due to concerns about “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”
Blanche, President Trump’s former defense attorney, said that the Justice Department is making redactions to protect victims’ identities and to comply with court orders.
“Absolutely positively not,” Blanche told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday when pressed if there were any political motivations behind some of the redactions in the Epstein files.
On Sunday, the DOJ continued its trickle of Epstein File disclosure by releasing a less redacted version of the 119-page grand jury testimony — which was originally awash in black-out ink.
Critics have ripped into the DOJ for not complying with the deadline to divulge the Epstein files and making a lot of redactions.
“Imagine if we had released tons of information around victims. That would be the true crime, that would be the true wrong,” Blanche countered.
The Justice Department’s No. 2 took note of the controversy about more than a dozen photos from the Epstein files that seemingly vanished from the DOJ’s website shortly after being published there on Friday, fueling suspicions. Trump was pictured in one of those photos.
“There were a number of photographs that were pulled down after being released on Friday. That’s because a judge in New York has ordered us to listen to any victim or victim rights group if they have any concerns about the material that we’re putting up,” Blanche explained.
Blanche refused to specify whether any of Epstein’s victims were in those photos the DOJ abruptly scrubbed from its website.
“It has nothing to do with President Trump. There are dozens of photos of President Trump already released to the public, seeing him with Mr. Epstein,” he also stressed.
The deputy attorney general promised that the photos would eventually be put back up on the website after the DOJ determines whether to redact elements of them.
The DOJ has been required to release thousands of documents to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed into law, and gave the administration a Dec. 19 deadline to furnish all the documents.
On Friday, the Trump administration revealed that more documents will be released in the coming days, after the deadline to fill the files to be made public.
“The reason why we are still reviewing documents and still continuing our process is simply … to protect victims,” Blanch said. “We’re going through a very methodical process with hundreds of lawyers looking at every document.
“…We are, in every way, shape, and form, complying with the statute,” Blanche later contended. “The material that we released on Friday or the material that we’re going to release over the next couple of weeks is exactly what the statute requires us to release.”
Blanche, who is also the acting Librarian of Congress, had stirred controversy over the summer when he privately met with Epstein’s madam, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Later, Maxwell was moved from the Federal Correction Institution facility in Tallahassee to the cushier and lower security Federal Prison Camp, Bryan.
The White House denied involvement in the transfer.
“That’s a Bureau of Prisons issue that I will not talk about,” Blanche, who is responsible for the Bureau of Prisons, said when pressed about the transfer. “At the institution she was in, she was suffering numerous, numerous threats against her life.”
“She was in federal prison before; she is in federal prison now.”
