Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department would not be protecting any notable figure, not even Donald Trump, by redacting their names in the future Jeffrey Epstein file releases. This contradicts a previous report suggesting that the US Department of Justice may have ended up redacting “politically exposed individuals.”

Trump not redacted from Epstein files: Blanche

“There’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name, Bill Clinton’s name, Reid Hoffman’s name . . . we’re not redacting the names of famous men and women that are associated with Epstein,” Blanche told ABC News in an interview published Saturday (US time).

When asked if document mentioning Trump would be made public, Blanche added, “assuming it’s consistent with the law, yes.”

Criticism over DOJ’s redacted Epstein files

His comments apparently sought to manage damage control after the DOJ was heavily criticised for redacting certain pages released on Friday in their entirety. Certain fully blacked-out documents became cause for much contention, with even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calling out that a whole document spanning 119 pages had been completely redacted.

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“This set of heavily redacted documents released by the Department of Justice today is just a fraction of the whole body of evidence,” he said after the DOJ website published its incomplete Epstein library, failing to meet the Dec 19 deadline for the Epstein Files Transparency Act. “Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law.”

NBC analysts have since found out that more than 680 pages of documents were entirely redacted in the four data sets released yesterday.

Meanwhile, a report from Fox News Digital further suggested that the redactions in place sought to protect more than just Epstein’s victims and accusers.

“The Justice Department redacted the names and identifiers of victims. Fox News Digital has learned that the same redaction standards were applied to politically exposed individuals and government officials,” the report noted.

At the same time, the US outlet plugged in a letter from Blanche, in which he told Congress members that the blacked-out information was included evidence. He said that releasing it could impact investigations that were still pending.

At least 16 files disappear from DOJ Epstein website

On Saturday, the DOJ continued released more files related to the late sex offender. But what caught attention even more prominently was the fact that at least 16 files released yesterday vanished from the Justice Department’s pubic webpage less than a day after the Dec 19 deadline.

According to the Associated Press, no explanation for the same was handed out by the government at the time of writing. Files that went missing, especially included a picture that showed a drawer, allegedly at one of Epstein’s properties, full of photos.

One of these images happened to be that of Trump posing alongside the late financier, Melania Trump and Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and associated Ghislaine Maxwell. The same drawer picture also appeared to have a physical photograph of a man, seemingly Trump, surrounded by bikini-clad women.

Other files to go missing included photos of painting portraying nude women.

Without any prior notice being rolled out for the unprecedented development, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee instantly called out the disappearance of the Trump-Epstein photo. In a post on X, they wrote, “What else is being covered up? We need transparency for the American public.”

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In a follow-up tweet, the Democrats accused, “This is a White House cover-up.”