So, now that we’ve rush-released all of those documents regarding the deceased financier and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, at the insistence of Congress — particularly the Democrats, who want anything they can tar and feather President Donald Trump with — what have we discovered?
First: Little of importance tying any of the powerful people in Epstein’s orbit to untoward or illegal activity.
Second: The unredacted names of nearly 100 of Epstein’s victims, heretofore anonymous.
Nice work, everyone. And, by the way, let it be known: Donald Trump predicted this.
From The New York Times:
A Manhattan federal judge said he would hold a hearing on Wednesday to consider shutting the government website that houses millions of files in the Jeffrey Epstein case after victims’ names were improperly disclosed.
The failure to redact the information had turned the lives of nearly 100 individual survivors “upside down,” lawyers for a group of victims said in a letter on Sunday.
The lawyers’ request came as Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledged on Monday in a letter to the court that the department had worked through the weekend and had “taken down several thousands of documents and media that may have inadvertently included victim-identifying information.” She blamed “various factors, including technical or human error.”
“For the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, every hour matters. The harm is ongoing and irreversible,” attorneys for the class of alleged Epstein victims, which number over 200 said in the letter to U.S. district judges, according to ABC News.
The lawyers said that they’d been in communication with the DOJ to ensure that, as Epstein material became available, “such failures would not recur.”
“That expectation was shattered on January 30, 2026, when DOJ committed what may be the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history,” the letter states, with ” thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by the DOJ’s latest release.”
“I have never come forward! I am now being harassed by the media and others,” wrote one victim, identified as Jane Doe in the letter.
“This is devastating to my life. … Please pull my name down immediately as every minute that these document with my name are up, it causes more harm to me. … Please, I’m begging you to delete my name!!!”
Who could have predicted this? Well, Donald Trump, for one, who said that he had “asked the Justice Department to release all Grand Jury testimony with respect to Jeffrey Epstein, subject only to Court Approval.”
But that wasn’t fast enough for some Epstein truthers in Congress — which, as my Western Journal colleague V. Saxena noted in December as this was being rushed through the lower chamber, carried a real risk:
… the Epstein-document discharge petition, HR 4405 (introduced by Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna and Republican Reps. Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene), contains a real risk of smearing innocent individuals.
While it allows for names to be redacted for national security concerns, it does not include redactions of those whose connection to Epstein is tangential at best.
Imagine, for instance, if deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein ever texted others purely for investment purposes. Even if the recipients didn’t text Epstein back, they’d still be exposed with an unredacted disclosure.
Or imagine if victims showed up there, too. Because that’s now a real thing!
And that’s, in part, because a Democrat who wants to become governor of California, a certifiably bat-feces lunatic libertarian, and a one-time MAGA firebrand who decided she wanted to court “The View” audience, instead, spearheaded an effort to force the documents out in as quick and slipshod a manner as possible because they knew the Trump DOJ would take the blame, not them.
This was backed, for the most part, by the Democrats, who figured they could spin a Trump lie or two somewhere out of the trove.
And so, given the limited amount of time, the DOJ and other entities were forced to speedrun the documents with pretty tight restrictions on redactions and — whadd’ya know? — stuff that shouldn’t have come out did come out.
What could Trump’s DOJ do? They were given 30 days to finish reviewing, redacting, and publishing millions of pages. There simply wasn’t enough time to redact properly, so the DOJ could either break the law that Democrats forced or protect the victims. They picked the law.
Meanwhile, the people who should be taking the blame — particularly Massie, whose X feed has basically degenerated into a rabbit hole of Epstein conspiracy theories so obsessive and outré it makes Mort Sahl’s career implosion over his fixation on the JFK assassination look quaint by comparison — are taking credit for the fact you can read the Epstein files:
If you’re reading Epstein files now, it’s because I’m in Congress and fighting.
I’m not taking all the credit. At least as much goes to @RepRoKhanna @FmrRepMTG @laurenboebert @RepNancyMace.
And too many documents are still being withheld or redacted, but we’ll get to that too.
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 31, 2026
And note the problem for Rep. Massie: “too many documents are still being withheld or redacted, but we’ll get to that too.”
Yeah, they’ll get to the bottom of who’s guilty, no matter how many innocent people they smear along the way. In the meantime, the only actual living people deeply implicated in this — Ghislaine Maxwell and the B.S. artist formerly known as Prince Andrew — have faced repercussions, and we didn’t need these carelessly unredacted files for any of that. You’re welcome, America.
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