The Department of Justice (DOJ) said Monday it has removed thousands of documents and “media” files that may have accidentally revealed information identifying victims after it began releasing a new batch of records Friday related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The department attributed the release of the sensitive material, which drew backlash from victims and their lawyers, to errors caused by “technical or human error,” according to the AP.
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton told the New York judges overseeing the sex-trafficking cases against Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell that the department had removed almost all material marked by the victims or their lawyers, except for a “substantial amount” of documents the government independently identified.
Clayton noted that the department has “repeatedly revised its protocols for dealing with flagrant documents” in response to requests from victims and their attorneys to adjust procedures for reviewing and redacting released records. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that while there were sporadic mistakes, the Justice Department acted quickly to correct them.
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Blanche mentioned, “Every time we hear from a victim or their attorney that they believe their name was not properly redacted, we immediately correct it. And the numbers we’re talking about, just so the American people understand, we’re talking about 0.001 percent of all materials.”
The DOJ on Friday released over three million pages of records, more than 2,000 videos and nearly 180,000 images in the latest batch.
What did Epstein victims’ lawyers write to the judges?
The letter, written by prominent lawyers for Epstein victims Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards and sent to the two federal judges in New York overseeing the cases involving Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, calls for “immediate judicial action” over the inclusion of victims’ information in the millions of Epstein-related records that have been released.
Henderson told CNN that the letter had been sent to the judges but had not yet been posted on the public court network. In a filing to Judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer, Henderson and Edwards said they had reported thousands of redaction failures in the previous 48 hours, affecting nearly 100 survivors whose lives they said had been severely disrupted by the latest release of the Justice Department document.
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They also told the court that the scale, frequency and duration of the failure could not reasonably be attributed to institutional incompetence, especially given that the Justice Department’s only court-ordered and repeatedly emphasized responsibility was to redact the known names of victims before the records were released.
The lawyers detailed the numerous editorial failures they said they uncovered, including one instance where the name of a minor victim was allegedly “revealed 20 times in a single document.” They said only three were corrected after the errors were reported to the Justice Department, “and 17 cases are still unclear as of this filing.”
They cited other examples, including an email that allegedly listed 32 minor victims “with only one name redacted and 31 remaining visible,” as well as FBI “302” forms that left victims’ full first and last names unredacted.