We’ve talked a lot about the high-powered lawyers and famous legal luminaries who find themselves in the notorious Epstein files. So it’s only fair to point out that we here at Above the Law also found ourselves in the Department of Justice’s latest document dump. I guess that’s the sort of participatory journalism you’ve come to expect from us. None of us gushed about the infamous pedophile’s parties or preened about gifts the trafficker gave us. Rather, an FBI agent received a copy of our Daily Newsletter in 2023 that included a story about Epstein.
While we’re at it, if you haven’t taken the opportunity to subscribe to our various newsletters, this is a perfect time. Make sure we’re featured when your inbox is featured in the next generational crime story.
But our cameo in the highest profile document production in the world should raise a few questions. Like “why is a publication’s newsletter in the Epstein files at all?” Or “why are they producing documents between a third party and an FBI agent?” Or, at the risk of being blunt, “why is a request for investigation files producing documents from FOUR YEARS AFTER THIS EPSTEIN JACKASS DIED?”
Assuming he’s dead, of course. Which wasn’t anything we questioned but now that they’re turning up press releases announcing his death from the day before he died and CBS News is reporting that the noose collected at the scene wasn’t the one used in hanging, maybe the conspiracy theorists are on to something.
In any event, there aren’t a lot of good reasons why this newsletter ended up marked responsive. The Trump administration was directed — by statute — to produce:
all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices, that relate to… Jeffrey Epstein including all investigations, prosecutions, or custodial matters.
My piece on AI training data isn’t really a snug fit.
But this is the same DOJ that dumped all these files into a janky database, knowing that they include discussions about the sexual exploitation of children and gated it with:
Good heavens. Jeffrey Epstein put more effort into making sure someone was 18. There are states with obscenity laws that would run websites out of business for such a lax age verification procedure. But the federal government, handling investigatory files detailing a child sex ring runs its age gate on the honor system.
It’s not like they’ve been rushed either. The statute required production “not later than” December 19th. The files didn’t actually show up in any meaningful volume until January 30, 2026. So they were six weeks late and considerable dollars short. Or, maybe this was a rush job, because the DOJ appeared content to flagrantly ignore the deadline until ICE agents started killing innocent people on camera. Suddenly, the salacious document production that could occupy the backburner for weeks became an urgency.
Then we got three million pages of material delivered with all the organizational rigor of a monkey smearing feces on the wall to mark its territory. The documents aren’t in any clear order or grouped in any identifiable way.
And the redaction “errors” — oh, the redaction errors. As NPR reported, the same DOJ PowerPoint presentation appears six times in the database with different redactions applied each time. That’s not even one of the egregious errors. The first tranche of documents made the redactions incorrectly such that the public could just copy and paste the text into a new document and see whatever appeared below the black box. The last time someone was dumb enough to do that Saddam Hussein was alive and well. It’s an error that no one makes anymore because everyone learned the hard way that you can’t use the bargain Adobe product to do your redactions. But Elon Musk’s DOGE canceled a bunch of government Adobe licenses as part of the ill-fated budget slashing charade. We’re not saying that directly resulted in these botched redactions but… you know.
Then there’s whatever this is:
That’s a redaction of the word “don’t.” That wouldn’t seem to be worthy of redaction unless someone committed a typo and didn’t include the apostrophe and software followed directions to eliminate any incidence of words with “Don” and “T” appearing next to each other (Or “don! w/1 t!” for the boolean heads out there… I see you). Meanwhile, victim names were left catastrophically unredacted, even though that’s one of the very few redactions the statute actually allowed.
Then the DOJ published and then quietly deleted a document that explicitly tagged Trump. It returned once social media called it out. Not suspicious at all.
Which brings us back to the ATL newsletter from years after Epstein’s death. In any normal litigation context, this kind of overproduction would earn a scolding from the court. Dumping millions of pages of loosely connected material to bury genuinely responsive documents is the kind of classic discovery abuse that Magistrate judges spend their lives swatting down.
Is it fair to accuse the DOJ of this? Well, yes, since they admitted it. From their statement accompanying this release, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche:
The Department erred on the side of over-collecting materials from various sources to best ensure maximum transparency and compliance with the Act.
Framing deliberate overproduction as a virtue is bold. And yet the DOJ isn’t just erring on the side of overproduction, it deliberately underproduced as well. This Schrödinger’s production managed to exist in both contradictory states by “over-collecting” newsletters while acknowledging that roughly 2.5 million pages of documents were being withheld from the public. While the statute did include provisions to prevent the public release of some material, it strains credulity to accept that almost half of the corpus of documents would fall into these intentionally limited categories. It would be nice to see something akin to a privilege log explaining exactly what statutory exception they’re claiming on these pages.
Alas, that would suggest good faith as opposed to the DOJ’s transparency theater.
But hey, we’re in the Epstein files. There’s an achievement I didn’t expect to unlock.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post Above The Law Is In The Epstein Files, Let Us Explain… appeared first on Above the Law.
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