When the Justice Department released its last trove of millions of files about Jeffrey Epstein, President Trump found himself in the same place he had spent a year trying to avoid—dealing with the fallout, again.
The files showed his own commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, had visited with Epstein long after Lutnick said they had cut ties.
Lutnick had to publicly explain his past statements, provoking a direct conversation with Trump, according to administration officials familiar with the matter. Trump questioned why he previously denied connections to Epstein when he knew he had visited Epstein’s island, the officials said.
Since last February, the administration has tried to move on from questions about an issue that has animated Trump supporters like few others, even as it has continued to metastasize.
Trump officials initially opposed the release of the files from the investigation into the convicted sex offender and then fumbled their response, telling allies there was little new information to glean from the documents.
The disclosures from the latest release, ordered by Congress, have instead forced prominent lawyers and business leaders to step aside, and prompted new criminal inquiries in three other countries. Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are testifying before Congress next week, after the released files included photos of Clinton visiting with Epstein, too.
The latest episode started during a conference call just before Christmas, when aides broke the news to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that another million documents attorneys believed were likely duplicates in fact weren’t.
Blanche sighed in exasperation, eventually alerting senior White House aides, who shared his anger and received updates for days, according to administration officials. In the ensuing weeks, the agency ordered hundreds of additional prosecutors to review the files, working through weekends to redact sensitive information and at times plying them with pizza to keep going at night.
“No one is suggesting this is how we wanted to start the year in terms of our focus. But, this is the task at hand,” wrote Tysen Duva, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, in a Jan. 9 email, telling lawyers to review 1,000 pages of Epstein files a day. “The sooner we do, the sooner this is over,” he wrote.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles relayed to the president that more Epstein news was coming, a development that had regularly frustrated him over the past year.
Attorney General Pam Bondi herself has been on thin ice with Trump, in part over her handling of the Epstein review. At a congressional hearing last week, Bondi went on the attack, dodging questions about the files and firing off insults at Democrats and plaudits for Trump.
Some Republicans complained about her performance, but the president was pleased, according to officials familiar with the matter. Trump has told aides that more Democrats are being dinged than Republicans, and has publicly said he was “exonerated.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump has confidence in both Bondi and Lutnick. “The Trump Administration’s release of the Epstein Files just proves President Trump was right about everything,” Leavitt said, singling out Democrats, liberal media and Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who pushed for the release, for criticism. “They just falsely accused President Trump of wrongdoing and a cover up to gain political points,” she said.
‘Original sin’
The problems for the White House began when Bondi met with social-media influencers in February last year, promising new information and handing out binders of information the White House hadn’t reviewed. White House aides now refer to it privately as the “original sin.”
The Trump administration had no plans to release millions of pages of documents, nor did they want Epstein to dominate the news. Trump was in the documents, officials familiar with the documents knew. So were many of his friends. Being mentioned in the files isn’t a sign of wrongdoing. Other documents contained salacious and unverified information from anonymous tipsters. Officials discussed how to move on, as Republican calls to release the files grew.
In April, Bondi invited Republican lawmakers to Justice Department headquarters. Over a formal dinner, Massie asked if she would release more files. The files are mostly child pornography, Bondi said. “Nobody wants to see that,” she said, according to Massie’s recollection.
The administration didn’t want to release more files but needed to tamp down outrage, officials said. So they released a statement over the July 4 holiday weekend saying the Justice Department and FBI had decided to release nothing else. The backlash arrived quickly from Congress, allies and conservative activists. White House officials began convening meetings in the Situation Room that included the vice president.
Trump advisers discussed putting out more Epstein-related material, but Trump wanted the story to go away, aides said.
Six days later, lawmakers introduced a bill to force disclosure.
No bill signing
As Massie sought support for the legislation, he found it easier than he expected to find Republican co-sponsors—until the Trump White House got involved. “You’re moving too fast,” Trump aide Jeff Freeland told Massie when they ran into each other on Independence Avenue. “I’ve given you too much time,” Massie retorted.
Trump convinced some lawmakers to withhold their support, and described the Republican holdouts as “stupid” in conversations with his aides. When the holdout lawmakers told the president about Epstein’s victims, Trump would repeat that he wasn’t implicated and that it was a “scam” to attack him, people familiar with the calls said.
Trump summoned GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado to a Situation Room meeting with his top aides. They hoped to convince her to back down, but she had spent 40 minutes just before with Massie, memorizing details and names, Massie said. “I wanted to go over there and tell them they’re wrong,” she told Massie.
Other lawmakers privately called the White House to ask if they could vote for the bill. Eventually Trump said he would support the bill after it was clear it would pass. The Senate would change the language, House Speaker Mike Johnson told the president.
The Senate didn’t ultimately change a word, frustrating Trump. Massie’s office asked the White House if he could attend the bill signing. The staffer who took the call said, ‘have a good day’ and hung up, said Massie, who instead printed a copy of the bill and hung it on his office wall.
Just after Trump signed the bill into law, he remarked to advisers that he couldn’t believe Republicans had let it go this far, two officials present said.
1,000 pages a day
The Justice Department then faced the unprecedented task of preparing to release millions of FBI investigative files, which are seldom made public outside of a criminal trial.
Blanche’s office told prosecutors in New York and Florida and federal-prisons officials, all of whom had some part of the Epstein investigation, to send everything they had to Justice Department headquarters, according to department officials. That yielded everything from physical documents to be scanned, to emails from a case against an unrelated defendant in Florida also named Epstein.
Officials knew the files contained reams of pornography and identifying details about dozens of Epstein’s victims, including nude photos, which would need to be blacked out.
A nine-page protocol noted that reviewers could encounter a host of potential land mines that could reveal victims, including that some of them testified under male pseudonyms that would need to be blacked out, and an array of third parties linked to them.
At 9:30 every morning, officials met to discuss their progress. Blanche would periodically send out terse emails to his leadership team prodding lawyers to pick up the pace, officials said. Meanwhile, Trump, frustrated with his Justice Department, kept telling Bondi and Blanche they were spending too much time on the Epstein files, White House officials said, and should focus on other prosecutions.
Justice Department officials were wrapping up their review of the files and preparing to release them when the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which had prosecuted the case, sent over one last batch, figuring it contained mostly duplicates. Instead, they turned out to contain one million new pages, a tranche of evidence that had been turned over to Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense attorneys to prepare for her trial. Blanche put out an emergency call to department heads to find volunteers to review new material through Christmas.
Most of the reviewers had little familiarity with the case, meaning they sometimes failed to recognize even prominent names that needed to be darkened and vice versa, Justice Department officials said. The result was a redaction process that left photos and intimate details about numerous victims exposed while appearing to keep some prominent names secret, generating criticism that continues to dog the department.
Among the more striking errors: The billionaire Leslie Wexner was referred to in an internal FBI document in August 2019 that was prepared shortly after Epstein died in jail. Wexner’s name was initially redacted when the document was released. The reason? Officials said it was possible the reviewer, coming into the case cold, thought the name Leslie was that of a woman, and therefore a victim. Wexner’s name appeared in the files 197 other times, the Justice Department said. Wexner has said he cut ties with Epstein around 2007 and wasn’t aware of crimes.
Another reviewer left a woman’s breasts exposed in a photo while trying to black out someone else’s face. Department officials have said they corrected every error as soon as they knew about it.
Write to Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com