In court filings, the department conceded its “inherent limitations” but made no mention of how those leading the department might have contributed to an even more “limited” effort. A former prosecutor at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office told me that “when prosecutors resign”—as many DOJ attorneys did throughout 2025—“they leave behind their case files and investigations, and unless new hires are made at the same rate of departures, those left behind might be forced to take on heavier caseloads.” The resources are typically available at DOJ for a large-scale project like this, adds a former senior official in a federal prosecutor’s office, but if assistant US attorneys have full caseloads, “it does not give you the bodies to put on the case. Or at the very least, the attention of those assigned is diverted.”
The DOJ may have been shorthanded thanks to the Trump administration’s approach to HR, but it wasn’t just the reduced workforce. The monthslong campaign to delay and then entirely block the release of the files—combined with the DOJ’s prior claims that it possessed thousands or hundreds of thousands of Epstein documents, not six million—contributed to the House Judiciary Committee’s belief that the department should be granted just 30 days to review and release the documents.
But with the limited time and resources the department did have, one area where it excelled was in shielding the names of those with great influence. Khanna referred to this practice of protection based on class as a “two-tiered system of justice.”
“It does not give you the bodies to put on the case.”
The names of various billionaires including Leslie Wexner, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, and Trump confidante Tom Barrack were redacted throughout the department’s original 3.5 million-page document drop. They were later uncovered through congressional pressure or corrected filings. (A spokesperson for Wexner told the BBC that he has no knowledge of, and did not participate in, Epstein’s illegal conduct.) Wexner, Sulayem, and Barrack have not been charged with any crimes, and certainly, the appearance of one’s name in the Epstein files does not by itself constitute evidence of wrongdoing. However, the act of shielding the names of billionaires while failing to protect victims’ identities carries its own implications.
On March 5, the department released previously unseen documents from the Epstein files that included summaries and notes from interviews the FBI conducted with a South Carolina woman who made allegations against both Epstein and Trump. In a statement posted to X, the department said some of the newly released documents were initially withheld because they had been “incorrectly coded as duplicative.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the woman’s allegations against the president as “completely baseless.” Trump has denied any wrongdoing related to the Epstein allegations, and the claims in these newly released files are uncorroborated. But the fact remains that those documents were not released with the others.
A legal term, res ipsa—Latin for “the thing speaks for itself”—seems fitting for the Epstein files release process. All of these decisions were made under the leadership of an attorney general who was previously one of Trump’s personal defense lawyers. So was Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who told the public that no new investigations would be opened or prosecutions pursued based on the contents of six million pages of documents related to an international sex trafficking operation. Then, weeks later, Bondi told a House committee that nearly half of the six million documents were being withheld in part to “protect investigations.” But when asked this month to confirm whether there are any open investigations related to Jeffrey Epstein, Natalie Baldassarre, a spokesperson for the DOJ, pointed Vanity Fair to the “AG and DAG’s public comments.”
