Todd Blanche wants to talk about the White House ballroom. Or the Southern Poverty Law Center. Or how to transfer taxpayer dollars into Donald Trump’s personal account. But he definitely does NOT want to talk about the Epstein files, a subject of inquiry that he’s bent over backward to obfuscate, frustrate, and affirmatively conceal from production. Faced with an explicit statutory command to turn over the Epstein files without any redactions or withholdings designed to protect the men involved, Blanche worked tirelessly to keep the men engaged in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation from the public eye. There’s an argument that his willingness to go in front of cameras and say that the Epstein files have all been released — a demonstrable lie, that even he acknowledges in other statements — and that the topic “should not be a part of anything going forward.”
It’s almost like Blanche’s boss has a vested interest in this criminal investigation disappearing!
This weekend, journalist Katie Phang filed a lawsuit laying out Blanche’s violations of the Epstein Transparency Act, styling her complaint as Administrative Procedures Act and ultra vires claims that Blanche directed the Department of Justice to arbitrarily and improperly act in direct opposition to statute.
In a sense, this is the other shoe dropping. The authors of the Epstein Transparency Act, Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, tried to get a judge to recognize the DOJ’s contemptuous approach to the Epstein files and to secure an independent monitor to complete the orderly release of the remaining documents, but Judge Paul Engelmayer turned away the request as outside the purview of the Maxwell criminal case he oversees. Still, Judge Engelmayer explained that they were free to bring a new lawsuit to seek compliance. Phang just did it.
After months of stonewalling, public pressure overwhelmed the Trump administration’s effort to sweep the matter under the rug and the Transparency Act became law. The Act gave DOJ 30 days to produce documents. The full production was due December 19 and the DOJ… did not comply. Blanche promised “several hundred thousand” more “over the next couple weeks” — a number, the complaint dryly notes, that “was several orders of magnitude” higher than what actually came out. By February 2, Blanche wrote Congress to declare that “[t]oday’s production marks the Department’s compliance with its production obligations under the Act.”
It did not mark that.
Documents could be withheld in only five enumerated circumstances: victim PII, child sexual abuse material, narrowly tailored and temporary withholding to protect active investigations, images of injury or abuse, and properly classified national security material. Critically, the Act explicitly forbids redactions based on “political sensitivity, or because of the embarrassment or reputational harm” to government officials, public figures, or foreign dignitaries. Congress wrote that with intent.
DOJ’s response was to redact things that fall into none of the permitted categories and several of the prohibited ones while pumping out clearly irrelevant material like the Above the Law newsletter written after Epstein’s death.
The complaint catalogs the kind of redactions that DOJ apparently believes are statutorily authorized. The identities of people in a draft indictment who allegedly conspired with Epstein “to persuade, induce, and entice individuals who had not attained the age of 18 years to engage in prostitution.” The identity of whoever wrote Epstein in 2014 to thank him for “a fun night” and praise his “littlest girl” for being “a little naughty.” The identity of the person who in 2017 told Epstein, “I met [REDACTED] today. She is like Lolita from Nabokov, femme miniature.” The person who told Epstein in 2018 about three “very good young poor” girls. And — because apparently the limiting principle here is “anything Trump’s friends might find awkward” — the identity of whoever Epstein wrote to in 2009 saying, “where are you? are you ok I loved the torture video.”
These are, as the complaint correctly notes, names of potential co-conspirators. That’s not victim PII, CSAM, or national security. The only conceivable hook is “active federal investigation,” which Blanche himself foreclosed when he announced the investigation “is over.”
Which, as an aside, was an amateurish own goal. The DOJ has a lot of latitude to pretend they’re investigating something. They only needed to say “we’re taking this seriously [wink, wink]” and held onto a colorable excuse for years. But they didn’t.
The complaint points to the DOJ failure to produce, retracted, or improperly redacted multiple categories of material referencing the President, including the accusation from a woman that the FBI interviewed four times who said Trump forced her to perform oral sex when she was a minor, a document describing Epstein introducing a 13-year-old girl to Trump at Mar-a-Lago with the line “this is a good one, huh,” and an email in which Epstein contradicted Trump’s later public claims about being kicked out of Mar-a-Lago. Some of these documents were produced to Maxwell’s defense team during her prosecution. They appeared briefly on DOJ’s website before disappearing. Sometimes they came back. Sometimes they didn’t.
Phang and her attorneys from the Public Integrity Project argue that the DOJ has a “nondiscretionary duty” — a phrase that does a lot of work in APA litigation — to produce the materials.
The two big questions going forward are standing and remedy. On standing, Phang’s contention is that she’s a journalist who has covered the Epstein matter for years across MSNBC, her YouTube channel, and Substack, and the complaint maps the harm with the kind of specificity that survives a 12(b)(1) motion: she can’t report on documents that don’t exist, can’t analyze redactions that aren’t explained, can’t assess scope when DOJ keeps unringing the bell. Whether that’s enough informational injury will be the first real fight.
But whatever happens, Blanche is back to talking about the Epstein files, the one topic his boss never wants to hear about again.
(Check out the complaint on the next page…)
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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