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The heavily, if poorly, redacted Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice have flouted an Act of congress that demands all offenders be revealed. By Lucia Osborne-Crowley.
What is missing from the Epstein files?
Since its December 19 deadline to make all of the “Epstein files” public, the United States Department of Justice has released several tranches of documents related to the investigation into convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Many of us have seen the reams and reams of blacked-out pages of documents, with entire transcripts completely redacted. That, in itself, is entirely indefensible, but there’s so much more to the story of this messy cover-up.
First – unbelievably – the government redacted the documents using Adobe Acrobat, or a similar program, meaning the redactions are not even embedded into the files. Anyone can simply copy and paste some redacted sections into Word to see the full text. It’s then clear that the government attempted to hide references to US President Donald Trump as well as other third parties who may have knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
It should go without saying, but just to be clear: Public Law 119-38, also known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in November last year, does not permit the government to make redactions in order to protect the president or any other potential third parties. It states clearly: “No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” It allows redactions only to protect the identity of victim-witnesses.
We don’t even need this simple copy-and-paste trick to see that the DOJ has improperly concealed evidence to protect the president. One document released in late 2025 – under the same Act – had already been made public by the Biden administration in 2024 in its unredacted form. The document is a report by one of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s known victims, who has received compensation from Epstein’s fund. The witness references another girl who “confided in me about her casual ‘friendship’ with Donald”. The testimony notes that “Mr Trump definitely seemed to have a thing for her and she told me how he kept going on about ... her ‘pert nipples’.” The witness goes on to describe the girl’s nipples, which had apparently been injured by Trump’s aggressive “flicking and sucking”.
When the DOJ released this document last month, every mention of Trump had been redacted. If you looked at the 2025 release alone, it would be impossible to identify the man referenced in the witness’s report. He is the current president of the United States.
At least 16 files uploaded in the December releases were quickly removed from the DoJ website. At least one included a photograph of Trump that had been kept in a drawer in one of Epstein’s homes.
None of these examples amount to evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the president. Nevertheless, the government has spent significant taxpayer funds in an attempt to hide these details. Why, if they do not directly incriminate the president? More importantly, what might be contained in the documents that haven’t been released?
It’s not just the president whose name is obscured in the released files. Several redactions hide the identities of other potential wrongdoers. In one case, a handwritten note references a girl being “found” for someone – that someone’s name is blacked out. Unless that person is also a victim, this is another violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The deadline for the DOJ to justify the legal basis for redactions was January 3. It has made no mention of any attempts to meet that deadline, nor offered any explanation for its redactions despite the legal duty to do so. On that day, however, the president confirmed the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, which has occupied news headlines ever since. In the wake of the news from Caracas, the official X account for the House Oversight Committee posted, “We are sure it’s just a coincidence, but today is the statutory date for the DOJ to explain its redactions in the Epstein file productions.”
The missed deadline has ramped up criticism of the US president over his handling of the files and reignited concerns about a cover-up – even from within his own party. Former MAGA loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned from congress over a split with Trump – and confirmed that her move related to the Epstein issue. “Epstein was everything,” she told The New York Times last month. Greene said in November the lack of transparency around the Epstein files had “ripped MAGA apart”.
Colorado representative Lauren Boebert, who was one of three Republican women to side with Democrats in the push to release the files, has recently accused the president of vetoing one of her bills in “retaliation”.
The sheer sloppiness of the attempt to remove references to the president and other potential third parties from the files is striking in itself. There is no world in which journalists were not going to discover the redactions could be revealed by a simple copy and paste, nor one in which we would miss 16 files disappearing from the disclosure website.
Evidence of this international sex trafficking ring has been suppressed for decades, ever since the sisters Maria and Annie Farmer reported Epstein to the FBI in 1996 and were ignored, disbelieved, or both. Survivors hoped Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction and 20-year sentence – along with increased pressure throughout 2025 to release the files, from both the survivors and Trump’s own MAGA supporters – would finally bring the truth to light. Instead, as Epstein survivor Jess Michaels has told me, “this is a cover-up of a cover-up of a crime”.
It would take many thousands of words to cover every significant item from the files already released, but here’s a whistlestop. We have photos of former president Bill Clinton with his arms around young women, and with one sitting on his lap – again, none that amount to evidence of criminal wrongdoing, but they surely warrant further investigation. There are new images of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – the former Duke of York – who has denied all allegations of misconduct. There is also an email from a man, signed “A”, asking Maxwell to find him some “inappropriate friends”.
Maxwell herself has asked a US federal court to vacate her prison sentence, claiming – despite all her appeals having been defeated, right up to the Supreme Court – she was not given a fair trial. I’d like to know why the emails between her and “A” were not presented to the jury in her 2021 trial. Maxwell is convicted of conspiracy to traffic minors for the purpose of sexual abuse, but her trial made no reference to any other alleged perpetrators in the sex trafficking ring. The conspiracy was to traffic underage girls to… no one. This email alone suggests otherwise.
The seriousness of what was included in the December release should force us to consider how much more incriminating the hidden evidence could be. This may be one of the biggest and most sophisticated child abuse and trafficking rings in modern history, and survivors are still being denied justice because someone who – at the very least – associated with members of that trafficking ring is in the White House.
This week the DoJ acknowledged that two million documents from the Epstein files remained “in various phases of review”. The department said they would not be released for several more weeks.
It’s important to remember that at the heart of this story is an organised system of sex trafficking for paedophiles – an actual conspiracy. “Conspiracy” is the precise word used in the charges against Ghislaine Maxwell, charges that were proved by a jury of her peers and which have survived all available appeals. The thing we don’t yet know is how many perpetrators are still out there, and what the president is trying to hide.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 10, 2026 as "The X-ed files".
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