Top DOJ official denies there’s any effort to redact mentions of President Trump from Epstein files

The No. 2 official in the Justice Department told ABC News in an interview Friday that there has been “no effort” to redact President Donald Trump’s name from the release of files stemming from federal investigations into convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. 

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked Friday in an interview by ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas whether every document that mentions Trump will be released as the government continues its rollout of hundreds of thousands of files in the coming weeks. 

“Assuming it’s consistent with the law, yes,” Blanche said. “So there’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name, Bill Clinton‘s name, Reid Hoffman‘s name. There’s no effort to hold back or not hold back because of that and — and so — but again, we’re not, we’re not redacting the names of famous men and women that are associated with Epstein.” 

When directly pressed over whether there’s been any order to DOJ  personnel to redact materials involving Trump, Blanche rejected any such suggestion and accused Democratic lawmakers of using selective disclosures from Epstein’s estate to present Trump in a negative light.  

“President Trump has certainly said from the beginning that he expects all files that can be released to be released and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Blanche said. 

Blanche sat for the interview just hours before the department released its first tranche of thousands of files, which contained little information related to Trump and instead included images of former President Bill Clinton without context, which were highlighted on social media by DOJ and White House officials.

A spokesperson for Clinton accused the department of selectively disclosing the pictures in a statement and denied that they showed any wrongdoing by the former president. 

“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday only to protect Bill Clinton,” Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Urena said Friday. “They can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton.”

“Everyone, especially MAGA, expects answers, not scapegoats,” the spokesperson said.

In the ABC News interview, Blanche further sought to defend the department’s decision not to release the entirety of its files subject to disclosure under the bill signed into law by Trump, which gave the Justice Department a 30-day deadline to release the entirety of its Epstein investigative files. 

“I did not say that all the files will not be released, I said all the files will not be released today,” Blanche said when asked about an interview he gave earlier Friday to Fox News. “And the law is very specific that the Department of Justice is required to make sure that we protect victims. And as recently as Wednesday, we learned of additional victim names, and so we’ve received over 1,200 names of victims and their family members since we started this process. And so there’s an established precedent that in a situation like this, where it’s in essence impossible for us to comply with the law today, that we comply with the law, consistent with the law.” 

When asked whether the public should be confident that Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal defense attorney, would act in the public’s interest over Trump, Blanche said the American people should look at what the department ultimately releases. 

“Your confidence should be in the fact that for decades, lots of people have been trying to go after President Trump falsely, and when it came to the Epstein saga, it’s exactly the same story.”  

Blanche added that the process to make redactions to the documents, “was not Attorney General [Pam] Bondi, [FBI] Director Patel, Todd Blanche going through and coding millions of documents and saying, ‘yes, no, yes, no.’ You have multiple, dozens and dozens of the most highly trained lawyers in the Department of Justice working for the National Security Division. These are career lawyers engaged in this process.” 

 Blanche defends prison transfer of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell  

In the interview, Blanche also defended the department’s controversial move over the summer to transfer Epstein’s convicted associate Ghislaine Maxwell to a lower security prison facility just days after he sat for an interview with her over two days in Florida. 

In an interview released by Vanity Fair earlier this week, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles denied that Trump was involved in the decision and said he disapproved of Maxwell’s transfer. 

While Blanche said he was “not permitted” to talk about security for individual inmates, he said Maxwell was facing “multiple threats” that warranted her being moved to a separate low-security facility in Texas. 

 “At the time that she was moved, there were multiple threats against her life, and like happens all the time at the Bureau of Prisons when that happens, one of the things that one of the options available to the warden and the security system within the Bureau of Prisons is to move the inmate,” Blanche said. “She’s not released. She’s in federal prison.” 

 Blanche further denied Maxwell was receiving any preferential treatment in the new facility, despite recent whistleblower disclosures released by congressional Democrats. 

 Blanche says investigations into Comey, James will continue 

ABC News separately asked Blanche whether the department plans to continue pursuing prosecutions against two of Trump’s top political targets, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey after a federal judge tossed their indictments in November on the basis that a Trump-installed prosecutor was unlawfully appointed. 

 Two separate federal grand juries in the past two weeks have rejected the department’s efforts to re-indict James on mortgage fraud charges and a separate federal judge in Washington, D.C., has restricted prosecutors from accessing key evidence in their probe of Comey. 

 Blanche confirmed the department’s investigation into Comey “is continuing” and said it was “not a mystery” that DOJ plans to still seek charges against him and rejected any suggestion the prosecution was “vindictive.” 

James and Comey have denied all wrongdoing.

 When asked about the interview that Wiles, the White House chief of staff, gave to Vanity Fair in which she candidly appeared to concede the DOJ’s prosecution of James was “retribution,” Blanche again defended the department’s actions. 

 “Because we’re looking at the evidence, we’re investigating them, investigating the cases. We have law enforcement, career law enforcement, doing the investigations are being presented to a grand jury in the normal course,” Blanche said. 

 ABC News has previously reported that career prosecutors on both the James and Comey investigations recommended prosecutors not pursue  either indictment based on what they considered the lack of sufficient evidence to secure a conviction.