MIAMI — After nearly two decades, the Justice Department on Friday finally released a small a portion of its voluminous criminal case files on the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The DOJ, under pressure to comply with a law passed by Congress last month, released tens of thousands of pages by Saturday morning. The materials had been long awaited by Epstein’s survivors, who have lobbied for years to force the government to take his crimes seriously — and to hold the other wealthy and powerful people involved with him accountable.

The DOJ’s documents are believed to span four presidential administrations, starting with George W. Bush, who was in office when the first underage girl, 14, reported to the Town of Palm Beach Police Department that she was molested by Epstein in his Florida mansion in 2005. By 2025, the DOJ estimated that Epstein had sexually assaulted or abused more than 1000 victims.

But the rollout didn’t go smoothly. Victims and the public were upset by the small amount of material, the heavy redactions, and the government’s failure to place any documents in the proper context. The digital download included hundreds of photographs, none of them labeled, and did not include witness and victim statements made to the FBI.

Many of the redactions were of material that has previously been made public — or that were supposed to be unsealed under the new law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, that was signed by President Donald Trump last month in spite of his earlier efforts to block its passage.

But by Saturday morning, the website showed new documents that provide new details about scope of the federal probes into his crimes, particularly the investigation conducted by the FBI beginning in 2006 in South Florida. That probe led to Epstein’s federal non-prosecution agreement, which allowed him to plead guilty to two state solicitation charges, one involving a minor, and escape a federal charges that could have sent him to prison for life.

The documents also included the grand jury transcripts from investigations into Epstein and his accomplice and ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell and hundreds of pages of testimony that Miami U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta provided in 2019 to DOJ investigators. During that hearing, federal investigators scrutinized Acosta, Trump’s former labor secretary, about how and why the decision was made to give Epstein such a lenient deal.

Under withering questioning, Acosta had to be corrected by investigators for calling Epstein’s victims “young women” when most of the three dozen girls who reported they were sexually assaulted ranged in age from 14 to 16 years old. He was also questioned about missing binders of evidence and an 11-month gap in Acosta’s incoming emails that coincided with the time frame that Epstein’s deal was negotiated. The gap has long been blamed on a technical glitch, but it’s not clear whether the Justice Department ever made an effort to retrieve them.

The documents also included transcripts and documents presented to a Florida grand jury in 2007 in connection with Epstein and the New York grand juries presented with evidence about Epstein, in 2019, and Maxwell in 2020. The grand jury investigation in Florida included testimony from two FBI agents as well as one victim who stated that she had given Epstein a naked massage when she was 16 but stopped him from fondling her. She then recruited several other girls to give Epstein sexualized massages, with ages ranging from 14 to 23, though she was subsequently told that the 23-year-old woman was too old. Epstein was known to pay girls for these massages in cash, often with $100 bills. The 2019 grand jury testimony in New York referred to a victim who was abused by Epstein in Palm Beach in 2004 and had bank slips showing that she had deposited $100 bills in her bank account soon after she visited Epstein. The photographs included images of famous people, Epstein’s mansions, sexual material such as sex toys, and hundreds of photos of naked or nearly naked young women — some clearly young girls — in sexual poses. At least one showed a small girl with her hair tied back, her face shadowed, laying in bed, nude. There were also paintings and photographs of naked young men and women.

There were also hundreds of mundane photos of interior spaces of Epstein’s residences — his laundry room, closed closet doors, piles of electrical wiring, ductwork, furniture, appliances, even his mops and brooms.

The Justice Department also removed some files which it had originally posted Friday. One missing image showed a drawer and table with various pictures on them, including pictures of both Trump and Clinton.

In some cases, the faces of what appear to be older men were also blacked out.

Later Friday, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote a letter to members of Congress, obtained by the Miami Herald, telling them that files were under additional review, which he expected to be completed in the next two weeks. In the six-page letter, he said that in addition to victims’ names being protected, he claimed other redactions were being made under “various privileges” such as “attorney-client privilege” and “work-product privilege.”

As part of the law, the attorney general has to provide all reasons for each of the redactions within 15 days of the release. The law explicitly prohibits redactions for reasons of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”

Lawmakers said the rollout fell far short of following the law.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, a co-sponsor of the Epstein files legislation said the release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law,” on social media Friday, and that a future DOJ could prosecute the attorney general. His co-sponsor on the bill, California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, called it “an incomplete release with too many redactions,” in a video statement.

Victims were disappointed.

“For survivors, this deadline is not symbolic; it’s a test of whether transparency will finally outweigh the protection of powerful interests,” said survivor Liz Stein. “This staggered release falls far short of the transparency that was intended with the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”

There were few documents, other than reports that had long been in the public record, such as flight logs, police reports and pages from the DOJ’s investigation into the case previously revealed in the 2021 trial of Epstein’s accomplice and ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

Among the files was also a 1996 complaint filed with the FBI — in which someone said that Epstein was selling photos of her sisters, ages 12 and 16, and threatened to burn down her house.

The new material included several photographs of former President Bill Clinton: in a pool with a woman whose face is blacked out, with Michael Jackson, and posing with Epstein. A framed photo shows Epstein and a woman holding a check, the signature line reading “DJTrump.” In another photo, former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is laying across the laps of a group of girls, with Maxwell behind him.

The law that required the files to be made public was authored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and signed by President Trump on Nov. 19. The president has criticized the intense focus on the documents, calling the files a “hoax” amid scrutiny into his friendship with Epstein.

Early Friday, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News that he expected several hundred thousand files would be released first, then “several hundred thousand more” in following weeks.

Later, on X, Blanche added that additional material would be released, “as our review continues, consistent with the law and with protections for victims.”

Top Democrats threatened legal action if DOJ failed to comply with the law.

In a joint statement, House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., wrote that Trump and the Justice Department are “now violating federal law as they continue covering up the facts and the evidence about Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long, billion-dollar, international sex trafficking ring.”

“We are now examining all legal options in the face of this violation of federal law,” Garcia and Raskin wrote.

The act does not specify any penalties for violations of the law.

Unsealing the Epstein files capped years of intense political debate in Washington which began in 2018, when the Miami Herald published an investigation into the case that raised questions about whether the deal prosecutors gave Epstein was legal.

Seven months later, Epstein was arrested by prosecutors in New York. He died a month later in federal prison. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging.

In the wake of the scandal, the U.S. Attorney in Miami who signed off on the deal, Alex Acosta, resigned as labor secretary under President Donald Trump.

The DOJ opened a probe into the deal in 2019, concluding that while Acosta had executed “poor judgment” neither he nor any of the prosecutors committed professional misconduct. A federal judge, however, ruled that the deal Epstein was given violated the federal Victims’ Rights Act.

The case continued to attract more scrutiny in 2021 as the DOJ successfully prosecuted Epstein’s accomplice Maxwell. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Then, as Trump campaigned to return to the White House in 2024 he and his supporters made the case part of the campaign. Trump indicated he would release at least some of the case files, and his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised full transparency.

But Bondi failed to fulfill that promise, causing a public outcry that only grew after she and FBI Director Kash Patel reversed course in July in a memo and closed the case, noting that there was no “credible” evidence that Epstein had blackmailed prominent individuals, or evidence to investigate anyone, other than Epstein, for committed crimes.

Trump confidant Elon Musk then abruptly announced on his social media platform X that the reason the files weren’t being unsealed was because Trump’s name was in them. Trump tried to distance himself from Epstein, denying he had much of a connection to the sex trafficker, other than in passing at parties and events.

Those statements seemed to fall flat after the House Oversight Committee earlier this year opened an investigation and began requesting files from the late financier’s estate. Among the files was a “Birthday Book,” that contained an intimately worded drawing and poem, purportedly written and signed by Trump in 2003. Trump has denied the drawing — and the signature — were his.

“Our government conspired with him and, in doing so, failed to protect hundreds of girls who would never have been harmed had our government simply done its job,” a group of over 20 survivors wrote in a November letter to congressional representatives.

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(Miami Herald reporters Shirsho Dasgupta, Ana Claudia Chacin, Linda Robertson and Churchill Ndonwie contributed to this report.)

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