‘Classified material missing from Epstein files’: Report reveals clues, gaps in emails | Today’s news

The report, consolidated on Thursday, claimed that the contents of at least three documents in the massive tranche of Epstein’s files indicated that classified information was included in files collected by the Justice Department.

Exactly what was classified and why remains a mystery.

Doubts about DOJ’s claims

One of the documents shows that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office itself received classified material related to Epstein in March 2025, CBC News reported. By law, material can only be classified for national security purposes.

This is despite Attorney General Blanche’s long assertion that the so-called Epstein files, even those kept from the public, do not contain any classified information related to national security.

When the release of the documents began last winter, Blanche noted that the Epstein Files Transparency Act authorized the withholding of information in the interest of national security or foreign policy, but said “no files are being withheld or redacted on that basis.”

“There’s no tranche of top-secret documents on Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding, in fact we’re not withholding anything based on (national defense information),” Blanche, who was deputy attorney general at the time, told CBS News.

The Justice Department reportedly claimed to have collected 6 million pages of material and ultimately released more than 3 million of those pages after reviewing them for duplication, attorney-client privilege and relevance to Jeffrey Epstein.

Congressional subpoenas and lawsuits challenge the Justice Department’s claims and demand the release of other documents that have been withheld.

Help on classified material

Included among the Epstein files is an eight-page timeline of the FBI’s New York office’s initial efforts last year to track down and deliver its voluminous files to the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters.

On March 25, 2025, one document shows the delivery of “16 Epstein items to ODAG,” referring to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. Among them, items #2 and #6 are described as “Epstein Transparency Project – Classified Material” and “Classified Material CDs (x2),” CBS reported.

The Epstein Transparency Project refers to the Justice Department’s efforts to review files and redact, withhold, or delete them for disclosure.

It is not clear what exactly was classified. Each CD was probably capable of holding hundreds of megabytes of material.

The files also contained an email sent the same day from the head of the National Security Classification Operations Unit, the office tasked with reviewing FBI documents for classification or declassification.

The email contains an attachment marked “Epstein – Classified Document Memo.docx”.

The text of the email states that “three documents have been identified that remain classified.” One was described as “an FBI document that is classified when it is transparent.” The redaction is covering up the description of the other two documents of the unit commander, the report claimed.

The identity of the email recipient was also revised.

It’s also unclear whether the two documents — the email and the list — refer to the same classified material.

Missing pages

A CBS News analysis of the numerical coding system used by the Justice Department to organize Epstein’s files offers clues to some of the documents the department has withheld.

The codes don’t reveal what’s missing, but they do show where gaps exist, raising questions about the Justice Department’s explanation for why the documents were withheld.

Among the missing documents are pages from Epstein’s own financial records collected as evidence in the federal prosecution.

Here’s how it works: Documents from the Epstein files are identified by a string of numbers beginning with the letters EFTA stamped in the lower right corner; EFTA stands for Epstein Files Transparency Act.

These are called Bates numbers – a common way of organizing large batches of documents in legal cases. Each page has its own number. In the Epstein files, the sequence ranges from 1 to 2,858,498, which is the sum of approximately how many pages of documents were released.

Additional documents — including court records and investigative files they previously released — bring the total to more than 3 million, according to the Justice Department.

In addition to the Bates numbers in the Epstein files, there are other, older code numbers that appear on many documents. This suggests that these documents were previously used in federal legal cases, potentially collected as part of an earlier subpoena.

For example, the Bates coding on some documents comes from Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal case and was used to organize files that were given to Maxwell’s legal team ahead of her 2021 trial as part of the discovery process.

Other Bates figures indicate that documents were collected from Epstein’s banks, including JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank, during the FBI’s investigation into his smuggling activities.

Similar gap analyzes have been conducted by independent researchers in the past.

Missing financial documents

Finding loopholes in these documents is a simple counting process.

In tens of thousands of cases, the main EFTA number shifts by one, but the other Bates numbers shift by two or more. These gaps indicate that the pages that were there before were probably removed at some point after the DOJ acquired them.

In another example, a series of approximately 4,500 check images from Epstein’s accounts has gaps where 66 of those check images should be. Often only the front or back of the check is missing the image, although in a few cases both are missing.

By comparing all these numbers with the final EFTA page numbers, it is possible to calculate that tens of thousands of pages of documents are missing from these sections without any clear reason why.

“Financial records were not a permissible category for removal,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. representative for the Eastern District of Michigan, told CBS News.

Like any federal prosecutor, he says he knows Bates’ numbers very well. “That’s why you have Bates numbers, so you notice something like that,” she said.

The Justice Department did not respond to CBS News’ recent inquiries about the Epstein files, but previously said every document required to be released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act had been released, and the remaining files were unrelated, privileged or duplicated.

Gaps in email

Another sequence of Bates numbers that provide a map of where the documents were removed appears to be from pre-processing of the files.

One large sequence of these has an “R1” between the EFTA and the page number.

This R1 numbering is found on approximately 995,000 pages issued, between p.61 and p.2,214,171 in the files. Each page is also marked with an EFTA page number.

While EFTAs are sequential, R1s have gaps that range from 1 page to hundreds of pages. Anytime a gap appears—for example, if EFTA moves by 1 but R1 moves by 2—this is evidence that pages have been removed.

By comparing these sequences, it is possible to identify gaps where documents, mostly e-mails, were deleted between the previous review and the final release. No partial emails turned up in the thousands of documents we examined, so the deletions appear to be entire email exchanges.

Emails are not sequential in date and skip days, months and years, so knowing what was removed out of context is simply not possible.

But the result of calculating the differences between the first and last number in this earlier sequence versus the later sequence is 1.2 million pages, which is the total number of gaps identified from this one section alone.

Most of the documents in this section are emails to or from Jeffrey Epstein, including communications with young women who would later accuse him of abuse; email exchanges with his business associates; messages to or from his assistant Lesley Groff; or emails sent or received by Ghislaine Maxwell.

“De-duping”

There is one possible explanation for the many flaws in email. Instructions provided to DOJ attorneys working on redactions include:

“If the document is an email chain and the most extensive email (i.e. including all the back and forth) has already been reviewed and edited to be suitable for production, the inserted back and forth can be flagged as duplicates.”

In other words, all emails exchanged before the last email in the chain can be considered a duplicate because the last one should contain all the messages and removing duplicates will speed up the redaction process. Once a document is flagged as a duplicate, it will likely be excluded from the files.

If it was, it was only partially done because there are still duplicate emails in the files.

There is also the possibility that errors in the process could have resulted in critical emails being accidentally deleted.

(With inputs from CBS News)