The internal watchdog for the Department of Justice (DOJ) has said it will review the department’s compliance with a law that required the DOJ to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
In a statement issued on April 23, acting DOJ Inspector General William Blier’s office said it would initiate an audit of the department’s overall compliance with the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“[The review’s] preliminary objective is to evaluate the DOJ’s processes for identifying, redacting, and releasing records in its possession as required by the Act,” the office said in a statement.
Namely, the inspector general would evaluate the department’s “identification, collection, and production of responsive material” related to Epstein or Maxwell, agency guidance and processes on “redacting and withholding material consistent with the requirements enumerated in the Act,” and the DOJ’s processes after publication of that material, the statement reads.
When its work is finished, the inspector general’s office will release a report with the results of the audit, it said, without providing a timetable.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the former deputy attorney general who was named earlier this month to his position after then-Attorney General Pam Bondi left the Trump administration, was involved in the DOJ’s release of Epstein-related files. Blanche has consistently defended the department’s work in releasing the files, arguing that DOJ personnel needed to take the requisite amount of time to issue redactions and protect victims.
Earlier this month, Blanche responded to a question from Fox News about whether the DOJ released all of the files. He said in his first interview as acting attorney general that the department has “released everything.”
“We are not sitting on a single piece of paper, nothing that should be released,” he said, noting, “If we didn’t release it, it’s because it was not responsive to the law.”
Several House lawmakers in February accused the department of improperly redacting Epstein-related files before they were published.
The FBI allegedly “scrubbed these files in March,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said at the time, saying that the process occurred before the Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed.
“The Epstein Files Transparency Act requires them to unredact those FBI files,” he said, according to a House transcript.
Khanna said the DOJ also told him and other lawmakers that the FBI had sent those files to the DOJ before publication.
“FBI sent scrubbed files,” he said. “That means the survivors’ statements to the FBI, naming rich and powerful men who went to Epstein’s island … are all hidden. They are all redacted.”
Blanche, in a post on X in February, responded to a separate Khanna claim of improper redactions and asserted that blacked-out text in one file was an email address. The redaction was consistent with the text of the law, he said.
“The law requires redactions for personally identifiable information, including if in an email address,” Blanche said. “And you know that the [individual’s] name is available unredacted in the files.”
Epstein, who was registered as a sex offender after a 2008 Florida conviction, was separately accused by federal prosecutors in 2019 of the sex-trafficking of minors. He committed suicide in his jail cell in the Manhattan borough of New York City in August 2019 while awaiting trial on those charges.
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year federal prison sentence after a jury convicted her on sex-trafficking charges in connection with Epstein.
On April 2, President Donald Trump announced that Bondi would be leaving her position for a private-sector job and named Blanche, his former personal attorney, to become the chief U.S. prosecutor.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment.
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