President Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pamela Bondi, recently announced that the Justice Department will not release documents about the politically connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, citing privacy concerns around child pornography allegedly included in the files.
But the department’s recent memo contradicts the agency’s prior legal rationale in a concurrent court case seeking the release of those same files, according to court records reviewed by the Lever.
The Trump administration’s July 2025 memo is the latest in a series of changing Justice Department arguments aiming to block the public records disclosure of more than 11,000 pages of documents the government has amassed related to the 2006 Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of Epstein.
For nearly a decade, a rotating cast of Justice Department officials across administrations has cited in legal briefs at least three conflicting reasons for why these records should be withheld from the public.
The department’s current legal defense argues that the files need to be withheld in order to protect the government’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s collaborator, who was convicted of sex trafficking minors and other charges in 2021. This Justice Department argument differs from both its initial argument eight years ago and now the Bondi memo, which claims the Epstein files should not be released because they contain child pornography and other materials that could be traumatizing to Epstein’s victims.
In 2017, two media outlets filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) record requests seeking documents related to the FBI’s 2006 investigation into Epstein’s activities. The bureau declined to release the files, claiming that Epstein’s right to privacy…
Auteur: Luke Goldstein
