Thousands of pages identifying Epstein victims taken down, says justice department | Jeffrey Epstein
The justice department said Monday that it had removed several thousand documents and “media” that may have mistakenly contained victim-identifying information since it began releasing the latest batch of documents related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein on Friday.
It was stated that the reason for the disclosure of sensitive information, which caused a reaction from the victims and their lawyers, was “technical or human error”.
In a letter to New York judges overseeing sex trafficking cases against Epstein and his confidante Ghislaine Maxwell, U.S. attorney Jay Clayton wrote that the department removed nearly all material identified by victims or their attorneys, as well as a “significant number” of documents independently identified by the government.
Clayton, based in Manhattan, said the department “repeatedly revised its protocols for flagging documents” after victims and their attorneys requested changes to the process for reviewing and redacting released records.
He wrote that when victims raised concerns that something needed to be corrected, the documents were immediately removed from the public website. He later said the concern was being evaluated before a redacted version of the document was republished “ideally within 24 to 36 hours.”
Also Monday, a section of the justice department’s Epstein files website that contained public court records related to Epstein and Maxwell’s criminal and civil cases was no longer functioning.
A message was left with the Department of Justice seeking comment on the issue on its website.
There are occasional errors in redacting or blacking out sensitive information, but the justice department tries to work quickly to resolve them, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said in an interview on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.
“Every time we heard from a victim or their attorney who believed their name wasn’t properly changed, we immediately corrected that. And for the American people to understand, the numbers we’re talking about, we’re talking about 0.001% of all material,” Blanche said.
The impact of errors in document redactions was revealed in a sex trafficking case in New York federal court on Monday morning, when attorneys and brothers of two top real estate brokers asked judge Valerie E Caproni for a mistrial because the documents were made public without the necessary redactions.
Deanna Paul, the defense attorney at the trial of Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander, said that “the government’s own conduct has eliminated the possibility of a fair trial in this case” after the brothers’ names were included in various documents released Friday. The brothers pleaded not guilty to drugging and raping numerous girls and women from 2008 to 2021.
Paul said the Alexander brothers were now “branded” as the “most toxic fraternity”.
The judge temporarily denied the motion to overturn the trial, but still confronted the prosecutor and asked: “Really the government?”
“Yes, I understand where the court is coming from,” replied assistant U.S. attorney Elizabeth Espinosa.
He said he was unsure how the documents “came into the universe of documents” related to Epstein, but confirmed that at least one of the documents mentioning the Alexander brothers “should have been properly redacted” and that the documents had been withdrawn from public circulation.
While speaking, Espinosa also gave an update on the general release of Epstein-related documents by the justice department, saying the remaining documents to be released are “primarily related to civil litigation” and may require a judge’s approval to be made public.
