Washington — A senior Justice Department official downplayed the possibility of additional criminal charges as a result Jeffrey Epstein filesHe said on Sunday that the presence of “horrific images” and disturbing email correspondence did not “necessarily allow us to prosecute someone.”
Department officials said over the summer that a review of records related to Epstein did not form the basis of new criminal investigations, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that position had not changed even as a large amount of documents since Friday shed new attention on Epstein’s links to powerful individuals around the world and revived questions about whether, if any, associates of the wealthy financier had knowledge of his crimes.
“There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of pictures. There’s a lot of horrific pictures that appear to have been taken by Mr. Epstein or the people around him,” Blanche said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But that doesn’t necessarily allow us to prosecute someone.”
He said victims of Epstein’s sexual assault “want to be healed,” but that “doesn’t mean we can just create evidence or that we can just come up with a case that doesn’t exist.”
president Donald Trump The Justice Department said on Friday it would release more than 3 million pages of documents, more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 photos under a law aimed at disclosing most of the material it collected during the long-running investigation into Epstein.
The repercussions of the release of the files were rapid.
in the united kingdom, Lord Peter Mandelson He announced his resignation from the ruling Labor Party on Sunday after more information about his relationship with Epstein was revealed. He said he would step down to avoid causing “further embarrassment,” even as he denied allegations he received money from Epstein two decades ago.
Meanwhile, a senior official in Slovakia left his post after photos and emails revealed he met Epstein in the years after Epstein was released from prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suggested it, an old friend of Epstein’s Andrew Mountbatten Windsorformerly known as Prince Andrew, was asked to tell US investigators everything he knew about Epstein’s activities.
The files posted on the department’s website included documents including Epstein’s friendship with Mountbatten-Windsor, along with Epstein’s email correspondence with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch, and other high-profile connections with people in political, business and philanthropic circles, such as billionaires. Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
The Epstein saga has long fascinated the public, in part because of his past friendships with Trump and former President Bill Clinton. Both men said they had no knowledge that Epstein abused underage girls.
Among the records was a spreadsheet created last August summarizing calls made to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center or to a hotline set up by prosecutors from people who claim to have some knowledge of wrongdoing by Trump. That document included a collection of unconfirmed stories involving various celebrities, somewhat fictional scenarios, and sometimes with notes indicating what, if any, follow-up the agents had undertaken.
Blanche said Sunday that there were “a large number of people” named in the files alongside Trump, and that the FBI had fielded “hundreds of calls” about high-profile individuals where “allegations were quickly determined to be not credible.”
Some of Epstein’s personal email correspondence included frank discussions with others about his penchant for paying women for sex, even after he served prison time for soliciting an underage prostitute. Epstein He killed himself in a New York prison In August 2019, a month after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.
In one 2013 email, an anonymous person wrote to Epstein about his choice “to surround himself with these young women in a capacity that bleeds over — perhaps somewhat arbitrarily — from the professional level to the personal level and back.”
“Even though these women are young, they are not too young to know that they are making a very specific choice in taking on this role with you,” that person wrote. “Especially in the wake of your trial, which was, after all, public, and could be — and indeed was — interpreted as a powerful man taking advantage of helpless young women, rather than the other way around.”
In a 2009 email, shortly after Epstein finished serving prison time for a sex crime in Florida, another woman, whose name has been withheld, criticized him for breaking his promise that they would spend some time alone together and try to have a child.
“I find myself having to question every agreement we made (no bitches in the house, in bed, watching movies, napping, two weeks alone, baby…),” she wrote. “Your last minute suggestion to spend this weekend with prostitutes is too much for me. I can’t live like this anymore.”
Blanche said in a separate appearance on ABC’s “This Week” that although there were “a small number of documents,” the Justice Department was waiting for a judge’s approval before it could release them, and when it came to the department’s examination of the documents, “that review is over.”
“We reviewed more than six million pieces of paper, thousands of videos, and tens of thousands of photos,” Blanche said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Los Angeles, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he believes the Justice Department is abiding by the law requiring disclosure of the files.
But Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., one of the bill’s sponsors, said he did not believe the department had fully complied. He said survivors felt upset because some of their names inadvertently appeared unredacted.
Blanche said that every time the department learns that a victim’s name was not redacted correctly, they move quickly to fix the problem and that these errors represent a small portion of the overall material.
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The AP is reviewing the documents released by the Justice Department in collaboration with journalists from Versant, CBS and NBC. Journalists from each newsroom work together to examine the files and share information about their contents. Each media outlet is responsible for its independent news coverage of the documents.