Top Justice Department official plays down chance for charges arising from Epstein files revelations

WASHINGTON (AP) — A top Justice Department official played down the possibility of additional criminal charges arising from the Jeffrey Epstein files, saying Sunday that the existence of “horrible photographs” and troubling email correspondence does not “allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.”

Department officials said over the summer that a review of Epstein-related records did not establish a basis for new criminal investigations.

That position remains unchanged, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said, even as a massive document dump since Friday has focused fresh attention on Epstein’s links to powerful individuals around the world and revived questions about what, if any, knowledge the wealthy financier’s associates had about his crimes.

“There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs. There’s a lot of horrible photographs that appear to be taken by Mr. Epstein or people around him,” Blanche said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.”

He said that victims of Epstein’s sex abuse “want to be made whole,” but that “doesn’t mean we can just create evidence or that we can just kind of come up with a case that isn’t there.”

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department said Friday that it would be releasing more than 3 million pages of documents along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images under a law intended to reveal most of the material it collected during two decades of investigations into Epstein.

The fallout from the release of the files has been swift. A top official in Slovakia left his position after photos and emails revealed he had met with Epstein in the years after Epstein was released from jail. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suggested that longtime Epstein friend Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, should tell U.S. investigators whether he knows about Epstein’s activities.

The revelations continue

The files, posted to the department’s website, included documents involving Epstein’s friendship with Mountbatten-Windsor, and Epstein’s email correspondence with onetime Trump adviser Steve Bannon, New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and other prominent contacts with people in political, business and philanthropic circles, such as billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

The Epstein saga has long fueled public fascination in part because of the financier’s past friendships with Trump and former President Bill Clinton. Both men said they had no knowledge Epstein was abusing underage girls.

Among the newly released records was a spreadsheet created last August that summarized calls made to the FBI’s National Threat Operation Center or to a hotline set by prosecutors from people claiming to have some knowledge of wrongdoing by Trump. That document included a range of uncorroborated stories involving many different celebrities, and somewhat fantastical scenarios, occasionally with notations indicating what follow-up, if any, was done by agents.

Blanche said Sunday that there were a “ton of people” named in the Epstein files besides Trump and that the FBI had fielded “hundreds of calls” about prominent individuals that were “quickly determined to not be credible.”

Some of Epstein’s personal email correspondence contained candid discussions with other people about his penchant for paying women for sex, even after he served jail time for soliciting an underage prostitute. Epstein killed himself in a New York jail in August 2019, a month after being indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.

In one 2013 email, a person whose name was blacked out wrote to Epstein about his choice “to surround yourself with these young women in a capacity that bleeds — perhaps, somewhat arbitrarily — from the professional into the personal and back.”

“Though these women are young, they are not too young to know that they are making a very particular choice in taking on this role with you,” the person wrote. “Especially in the aftermath of your trial which, after all, was public and could be — indeed was — interpreted as a powerful man taking advantage of powerless young women, instead of the other way around.”

In another email written in 2009, not long after Epstein had finished serving jail time for his Florida sex crime, another woman, whose name was redacted, excoriated him for breaking a promise that they would spend time alone together and try to conceive a baby.

“I find myself having to question every agreement we have made (no prostitutes staying in the house, in our bed, movies, naps, two weeks Alone, baby…),” She wrote. “Your last minute suggestion to spend THIS weekend with prostitutes is just too much for me to handle. I can’t live like this anymore.”

‘This review is over’

Blanche said in a separate appearance on ABC’s “This Week” that though there are a “small number of documents” that the Justice Department is waiting for a judge’s approval before it can release, when it comes to the department’s own scouring of documents, “this review is over.”

“We reviewed over six million pieces of paper, thousands of videos, tens of thousands of images,” Blanche said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he thinks the Department of Justice is complying with the law requiring public disclosure of the Epstein files.

But Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and co-sponsor of the law requiring the Justice Department to release its Epstein files, said he did not believe the department had fully complied. He said survivors are upset that many of their names accidentally had come out without redactions and they want to make sure the rest of the files come out.

Blanche said each time the department has learned that a victim’s name was not properly redacted, it has moved quickly to fix the problem but that those mistakes account for a tiny fraction of the overall materials.

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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 are working together to examine the files and share information about what is in them. Each outlet is responsible for its own independent news coverage of the documents.