They're Hiding Behind Victims to Protect a President

The Justice Department told a federal judge no.

Jul 05, 2026

Hours before a court deadline, DOJ said it would rather ask for two more months than hand over what it was ordered to produce. The excuse: protecting victims. The problem: the same filing is fighting to keep sealed the exact material that mentions Donald Trump.

Stop pretending this is about privacy. Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Trump signed it into law in November. The deadline to release everything was December 19. That date came and went. It took independent journalist Katie Phang suing the department in April to force the issue. In a 48-page opinion, Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled DOJ likely broke the law, ordered it to either release specific documents or justify on the record why it couldn’t, and refused to pause his own order to give the government time to appeal.

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On Thursday night, hours before that new deadline, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward filed DOJ’s answer. The department flatly disagrees with the order. It wants 60 more days, or it wants the judge to just accept its reasoning and drop the whole thing. Woodward’s own words: DOJ has “not knowingly violated, nor has it ever acknowledged violating” the law.

DOJ says it reviewed more than 6 million pages before deciding you don’t get to see them. That review ran on your tax dollars, start to finish. What you got back was a press release about victim protection.

Nobody is arguing survivors should be named without consent. Real redaction protects real people, and that’s not in dispute. But watch what’s actually bundled under that excuse. The court order covers at least 8 email exchanges with Epstein about a torture video and sexual activity with young women, including minors. In one from 2015, the sender asks whether he’s a pervert for calling 14 and 15 year old girls of reproductive age. On the torture-video email, the recipient’s name is blacked out. Blanche himself later suggested it was Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the former head of Dubai’s DP World. The same filing is also fighting to withhold the FBI interview notes behind an uncorroborated assault claim against Trump, which he denies. Victims became the shield. The men on the other end of those emails became the ones actually protected.

And here’s where the excuse collapses. The transparency law flatly bars redacting anything to spare someone “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.” Those are the only reasons that fit hiding the name of a man emailing Epstein about a torture video. Meanwhile Blanche told Fox back in April that the department had released everything, that it wasn’t sitting on a single page. Half of it is still withheld.

This weekend the country threw itself a 250th birthday party. The president stood on the National Mall and called America the crowning achievement of human history. The greatest political journey ever undertaken. A golden age. The largest fireworks show ever staged.

And in the same 72 hours, that same government looked a federal judge in the eye and said it could not manage to unredact who Epstein was emailing about girls as young as 14.

Two hundred and fifty years. Moon landings. The most powerful law enforcement apparatus on the planet. Six million pages reviewed. And it cannot, or will not, name the people in Jeffrey Epstein’s files. Sit with that. A country that can put a man on the moon says it lost the paperwork.

That is not incompetence. The swamp isn’t a figure of speech here, it’s a load-bearing wall. It runs so deep that a superpower toasting its own greatness would rather misplace a 2007 draft indictment than let you read it. That draft has a heading marked co-conspirators. Four of the five names under it are blacked out. The only one still visible is Ghislaine Maxwell. DOJ says it cannot locate an unredacted copy of the one page tied to the sweetheart deal that let Epstein serve a few months instead of federal charges.

Here’s the part the fireworks are built to drown out. America sells the world one product above all others: the promise that its institutions are independent enough to prosecute their own. The Epstein stall is the proof that the promise is marketing, not machinery, and every country watching already knows it.

And we’re still waiting on Thomas Massie to read out all the names. He named three on the House floor back in February, promised the rest was coming, and now he’s out in January while the list still hasn’t arrived.

This isn’t left versus right, and don’t let anyone sell it to you that way. Both parties spent two decades not asking who was in Epstein’s orbit. The partisan fight over who “really” wants the files released is theater. The real fight is whether any federal agency in this country still answers to a judge when the order is inconvenient to somebody powerful.

Watch what happens next. DOJ has already signaled it may appeal Sullivan’s ruling, and a department spokesperson called his reading of the law “perverse.” The play is always the same: appeal, delay, let the cycle move on. The agency never lies outright. It just runs out the clock and calls that compliance.