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Rep. Jamie Raskin from Maryland, who serves as the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has voiced serious concerns after examining the unredacted Epstein files. He believes the Department of Justice (DOJ) has potentially violated legal protocols by obscuring various names within the documents.
This scrutiny comes after lawmakers were granted access to view the full, unredacted DOJ files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious sex offender who has since died. The review was prompted by doubts among several Congress members regarding the DOJ’s adherence to a law requiring nearly complete public disclosure of the files, with only minor redactions permitted.
Raskin expressed his concerns on Monday, pointing out that the documents not only fail to protect the identities of victims, as required, but also seem to conceal the identities of individuals associated with Epstein. He suggested these redactions were made to protect those individuals from potential embarrassment or political fallout rather than any legitimate legal reasons.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that there are numerous unnecessary redactions, alongside the troubling failure to redact victim names,” Raskin stated. “This is very concerning for us.”
He further emphasized the improbability of Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell operating a billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring alone. “There’s no way it was just the two of them. We need to uncover who else was involved and what other conspiracies exist. Listening to the survivors will be crucial in navigating through this disturbing situation,” Raskin asserted.
Among the documents Raskin said were redacted was a discussion from Epstein’s lawyers that contradicts an assertion from President Trump that he kicked the deceased financier out of his Mar-a-Lago club.
It’s unclear where Epstein’s lawyers got the information or whether it was accurate, but Raskin argued there was no legal basis for shielding the email in the files.
“Epstein’s lawyers synopsized and quoted Trump as saying that that Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of his club at Mar-a-Lago, but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and he had never been asked to leave, and that was redacted for some indeterminate, inscrutable reason. I know it seems to be at odds with some things that President Trump has been saying recently about how he had kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club or asked him to leave,” Raskin said.
“There is certainly nothing in our federal law that would require redaction in that case.”
The files can only be viewed by lawmakers, not their staff, and can only be seen within the DOJ office.
Raskin said there are just four computers available for lawmakers to review the roughly 3 million pages of documents that have been released. During the multiple hours he reviewed documents, Raskin estimated he reviewed 30 or 40 documents.
“This is going to be an extremely time-consuming and painstaking process,” he said.
“There are puzzling, inexplicable redactions, and so we need some explanation for the Department of Justice about what their process was and why it seems to have created so many erroneous non redactions, causing tremendous pain to survivors, and then so many seemingly false redactions.”
DOJ officials have yet to file a report justifying their redactions.
A staffer for Raskin said he plans to go back and continue reviewing the files.
However, Raskin said he will not be able to review a significant portion of the files before Attorney General Pam Bondi appears before the panel on Wednesday.
“There is no way before Attorney General Bondi arrives on Wednesday that we’re going to have the opportunity to go through every reduction in order to ask thorough questions,” he said.