One of the documents published last Friday as part of the latest declassification of Epstein’s papers has disappeared from the website where the United States Department of Justice hosted them, and that threatens to open a new front for the president, Donald Trump, a friend of the millionaire pedophile for 15 years.
This is one of the nearly 4,000 images recently released. In it you can see a desk with a pile of framed photos of the financier Epstein accompanied by various personalities (Pope John Paul II, during a Vatican reception, included). There is more, unframed, in an open drawer, containing a tiny image of Trump surrounded by four bikini-clad women; Along with this, another more well-known one in which the then real estate magnate is with his future wife, Melania Trump, and with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his best friend and organizer of his minor sex trafficking network.
It’s very difficult to notice that detail at first glance, but on Friday, while reporters and experts in the Epstein cases were rushing through the new declassified papers, someone made a comment. zoom and published the result. Taking into account that Trump is practically absent from the documents published in this latest batch, it was striking that this photo had passed without retouching the cut of the 200 Justice Department officials who supervised and censored the published papers.
A few hours later, that file, the now famous EFTA000000468.pdf, had disappeared from the microsite created by the Department of Justice. This incorporates a search tool, as required by the law that forced Attorney General Pam Bondi to publish the papers. Congress also required making available all of the financier’s and Maxwell’s case files. But the Government only released a part. The rest, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche promised, will follow in the coming days.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, which in recent months has been publishing Epstein documents obtained from his heirs by court order, were quick to point out the disappearance on Saturday. “(The) file 468, in which Donald Trump is seen, has apparently been deleted by the Department of Justice. @AGPamBondi: is this true? What else is being hidden? We need transparency for the American public,” the Democratic party questioned in X.
Blanche, Bondi’s deputy and unofficial spokesperson for this latest declassification, gave an interview to NBC this Sunday morning in which she confirmed the disappearance of that and 15 other files. “It is ridiculous to think that we have deleted a photo, a single photo, just because it featured President Trump. And the fact that this is criticized only reflects the true intentions of whoever does it. Any person, any victim, any lawyer, any victims’ rights group, can contact us and ask that we remove any document. We, of course, will remove it and investigate,” he said.
Were they victims?
Kristen Welker, the journalist who was interviewing him, then asked him: “Are you saying that one or more of the women in one or more of the photos is a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, and that is why those files were deleted?” And there Blanche got into trouble. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. We, of course, if we had known, if we had believed that photograph contained the image of a survivor (of Epstein’s abuse), we would not have published it in the first place without censoring the faces. But whatever we believe, we don’t have all the information. And so when we received a notice from victims’ rights groups about a photograph like that, we removed it and investigated it.”
The deputy attorney general promised that at the end of that process Trump’s image will return to where it was and that, if any of the women who appear are a victim, their face will be censored: “As Congress expects us to do, as the president expects us to do, and as the attorney general and (FBI) director Kash Patel have ordered the (Justice) Department to do.”
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, approved by all Washington congressmen except one – a Republican – requires preserving the privacy of victims and censoring graphic materials about abuse or child pornography. The last batch of papers comes with many erasures and that has provoked criticism, also from the survivors of the abuse and from the politicians who managed to push the law forward and bend the arm of the Trump Administration, which had been refusing to publish more materials for months.
Is so much censorship justified? Does the declassification meet the demand for transparency in a case that has obsessed American public opinion since Epstein died in 2019—he committed suicide, according to the autopsy—while waiting to be tried as the leader of a minor sex trafficking network with hundreds of victims?
The question about whether or not to cross out the faces of the women accompanying Trump in that photo places Blanche and her family before a paradox. The juiciest part of Epstein’s latest release of papers are the photos in which former President Bill Clinton is seen with a group of women with their faces covered, in environments as compromising as a jacuzzi. When these new photos became known, many Republicans made the following syllogism: if the Justice Department erased the faces of victims or minors, then Clinton was in that jacuzzi with a victim or a minor.
If the faces in Trump’s photo deserve to be covered, then, following that logic, the president of the United States also allowed himself to be photographed with a minor or a victim. And if those women didn’t fall into either category, why did the Justice Department inadvertently make the image disappear? The question remains unanswered.
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