If you’re new here, I read the actual filings and write them up the same day. Subscribing is free. If you can afford the paid tier, that’s what makes the same-day part possible.
Yesterday I wrote that Todd Blanche had until three o’clock Thursday to prove to a federal judge that his Epstein redactions were legal.
He made it with thirty-two minutes to spare. Hard copies, hand-delivered to Judge Emmet Sullivan’s chambers at 2:28 p.m., along with a justification for each of the ten Bates-numbered files the court had identified.
In the same hour, a second document hit the docket in the same case. A woman who survived Epstein, filing anonymously, asked the same judge to keep her name blacked out.
Both filings are real. They point in opposite directions only if you haven’t read the document that explains both of them, which is a Justice Department memo dated January 4, 2026, out of the office of the Deputy Attorney General. The Deputy Attorney General at the time was Todd Blanche.
DOJ published it themselves. Almost nobody has read it.
Congress wrote five
Start with the statute, because everything turns on how short it is.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act requires release, and § 2(b) forbids withholding anything “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
Then § 2(c)(1) lists what the Attorney General may withhold. Five categories. Personally identifiable information of victims, and victims’ personal and medical files and similar files whose disclosure would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. Child sexual abuse material. Material that would jeopardize an active federal investigation, narrowly tailored and temporary. Images of death, physical abuse or injury. Properly classified national security information.
That’s the list. DOJ’s own protocol quotes it accurately on page 4, under the heading “Permitted Withholdings and/or Redactions,” and states plainly that permitted withholdings “fall into the following five categories.”
The memo adds more
Four pages later, under a heading called “Other Permitted Withholdings,” the same memo instructs reviewers to redact things that appear nowhere in those five.
Names of government employees: Assistant U.S. Attorneys, DOJ staff, law enforcement, Bureau of Prisons employees, OIG employees, contractors. The carve-outs are narrow, covering Senate-confirmed officials including acting ones, public affairs staff, and the two BOP guards who were prosecuted.
Privileged material, including deliberative process, work product and attorney-client.
Sealed records.
The bridge sentence is on page 5: beyond the Act’s five categories, “certain personal identifying information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) must be redacted to comply with existing federal law.”
DOJ has an argument here, and it isn’t frivolous. The Privacy Act exists. FOIA privacy exemptions exist. The Department will say those operate independently of the Transparency Act, and that § 2(c)(1)(A)’s reference to “similar files” reaches further than victims alone.
But read the clause. Every noun in it is about victims. Personally identifiable information of victims. Victims’ personal and medical files. Similar files whose disclosure would invade personal privacy. Congress wrote a specific carve-out for the people Epstein harmed. It did not write one for the prosecutors who handled his case.
And Sullivan appears to have noticed. His July 25 order specifically demanded proof on the law enforcement redactions, not just the victim ones.
Which brings us to what DOJ filed Thursday. In the compliance notice, file nine is defended on the ground that the redactions in the “To” and “From” lines protect law enforcement personnel. File ten notes that the name of an Assistant U.S. Attorney is also redacted.
Two of the ten files in front of that judge rest on a category the Justice Department wrote for itself.
The exception that eats the mandate
Now look at what Congress specifically demanded.
Section 2(a)(7) covers internal DOJ communications—emails, memos, meeting notes—concerning decisions to charge, not charge, investigate, or decline to investigate Epstein and his associates.
Congress asked for the deliberations. That is the entire point of the provision. That’s the non-prosecution agreement. That’s the declination. That’s how a man like that walked in 2007 and again after.
The protocol permits reviewers to redact deliberative process material, which it defines, quoting the Supreme Court, as documents reflecting “advisory opinions, recommendations and deliberations comprising part of a process by which governmental decisions and policies are formulated.”
Those are the same documents. The exception swallows the requirement.
In fairness, the memo instructs reviewers not to apply privilege liberally. But it’s in there, and there’s no published record of how often it got used.
And then there’s the line I keep coming back to. On page 9, under “Other”: defense counsel names, do not redact.
Epstein’s lawyers, you get to see. The prosecutors who decided how to handle him, you don’t.
The hardest part of the memo
Some members of Congress who viewed the unredacted files have said publicly that people hiding behind victim redactions include co-conspirators. Here is the rule that produces that claim, and it deserves to be read carefully rather than quoted angrily.
Page 5: victim redactions pertain “to all victims, even victims who later became perpetrators.”
The memo’s own background section explains why. Epstein directed some of the girls he was abusing to recruit other girls. Some brought one or two friends. Some brought dozens.
I spent 15 years as a public defender. A fourteen-year-old who is being abused and is then sent out to bring back other fourteen-year-olds is a victim who was made into an instrument. It is one of the most common and most deliberate things traffickers do. The law has always struggled with it, and everyone who works in this area knows it.
So the rule is defensible. I would probably write it the same way.
The problem isn’t the rule. It’s that a rule that broad, applied entirely in secret, with no published log of which redaction got which justification, means that from the outside you cannot tell the difference between a survivor being protected and a grown man being protected.
Which is the whole reason the second filing matters.
The most careful filing of the day
Thursday afternoon, a woman who survived Epstein moved to intervene as Jane Doe for the sole purpose of keeping her name redacted. She is represented by Brittany Henderson of Edwards Henderson, whose firm represents more than two hundred Epstein survivors.
Two of the documents on Sullivan’s desk are emails this woman wrote while she was under Epstein’s control. The emails themselves are already public. Only her name is not. She takes no position on the merits of Phang’s suit, seeks nothing from the litigation, and asks for one line to stay black.
Her brief also answers the statutory question head-on, and it does it better than the government did. Section 2(b) bars withholding for embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity. Its object is to prevent the shielding of the powerful. It says nothing about victims, and it cannot be read to override § 2(c)(1)(A) without rendering that provision a nullity.
The most careful, most specific, most legally grounded defense of a redaction filed in that court Thursday did not come from the Justice Department. It came from a victim’s lawyer.
The request nobody is covering
Henderson asked for one more thing, and it’s the most consequential item on the docket right now.
She asked the court to order DOJ to notify any affected victim, or her counsel, before lifting any redaction applied under § 2(c)(1)(A), and to give her fourteen days to seek relief.
Her reasoning is the entire problem stated in five words: redactions are opaque by design.
Her client found her own documents because she recognized her own writing. A woman whose name appears in a document she did not write has no comparable way to know. She will find out when she reads it in the press, or when a reporter appears at her door.
If Sullivan grants that, it changes the timeline for every unredaction in this case.
The false choice
You are going to be told this is a choice between protecting survivors and naming powerful men. It isn’t, and the statute is the proof.
In February, Rep. Thomas Massie got DOJ to unredact Les Wexner’s name. The Department’s stated reason for hiding it had been that it appeared on a page alongside victims’ names. Wexner’s representatives say a federal prosecutor told his counsel in 2019 that he was neither a co-conspirator nor a target. Massie’s answer to the redaction rationale was the correct one: redact the victims on that page and publish everyone else.
And here is how much care the process actually got. The protocol instructs, for Epstein and his entities, redact his Social Security number and phone numbers and “do not redact anything else, including his email addresses.”
In Thursday’s filing, DOJ conceded it had redacted Epstein’s email address anyway, and lifted it only after a judge ordered it to open the file.
What this is not
Nothing was released Thursday. Judge Sullivan has not ruled on anything—not the redactions, not the intervention motion. And a survivor asking to keep her name covered is not the files being buried. Katie Phang’s lawsuit is legitimate and necessary, and both things hold at once.
What to watch
Whether Sullivan orders anything unsealed after reading the files himself. Whether DOJ goes to the D.C. Circuit to stop him. Whether he grants the fourteen-day victim notice request.
And whether the written justification for every redaction that the statute required—which still, today, does not exist in public—is ever published.
That missing log is the reason this is happening ten files at a time, in front of one judge, behind a closed door, instead of all at once and in the open.
Before you go
I’ll be reading the docket tonight and tomorrow, and I’ll write it up the day it moves.
This post took an afternoon of reading a court filing, a motion to intervene, and a nine-page internal DOJ memo, and putting them side by side with the statute. I’d rather spend tomorrow doing the same thing than doing something else for money. Free subscriptions help. Paid subscriptions are the reason I can cover this full time instead of around the edges of another job. If you’re in a position to upgrade, that’s my ask. I’m grateful for you!
Sources
DOJ, “Attorney Review Protocol for Epstein Files,” January 4, 2026—the memo this post is about, published by the Department: justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures
Phang v. Blanche, No. 1:26-cv-01417 (D.D.C.)—full docket, including DOJ’s July 30 Notice of Compliance (Dkt. 25) and the non-party motion to intervene (Dkt. 26): courtlistener.com/docket/73246595/phang-v-blanche
Epstein Files Transparency Act, Pub. L. 119-38—§ 2(a) scope, § 2(b) prohibited grounds, § 2(c)(1) the five permitted withholdings: congress.gov
Bipartisan letter from Sens. Merkley, Murkowski, Luján and Durbin requesting a GAO audit of DOJ’s redaction practices: merkley.senate.gov
Written Thursday, July 30, 2026. Nothing has been ruled on.
