Democrats have promised to fight what they say is a “full-blown cover-up” of the Epstein files after the Trump administration on Sunday effectively declared its investigation into the disgraced late financier and sex offender closed.
The release of more than 3m new pages by the justice department on Friday represented the final act of compliance with legislation ordering the full disclosure of all investigative documents in its possession, according to the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche.
“This review is over,” he told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “We reviewed over six million pieces of paper, thousands of videos, thousands – tens of thousands of images … which is what the statute required us to do.”
But Blanche’s declaration drew the ire of several senior Democrats, and a Republican – Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie – who are demanding the release of millions more pages they insist are still being deliberately withheld.
“We are witnessing a full blown cover-up,” the Democratic Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
“They’ve said there are 6m potentially responsive documents there. They’ve only released 3m with more than 10,000 redactions. What about the other 3m files? Remember, not only is there a subpoena to attorney general [Pam] Bondi to turn everything over to Congress, now there’s a federal law compelling them to turn it over, and yet, we’re just getting the dribs and drabs of information coming out, the stuff that they want us to see.”
Raskin, the ranking member of the House judiciary committee, wrote to Blanche on Saturday demanding that he and other Democratic members be allowed to view materials in the Friday release in unredacted form. Multiple names and other information were blacked out, even though the papers did reveal sordid new details of Epstein’s abuse, including his alleged trafficking of victims to other men.
But Raskin said Blanche’s insistence that “we have nothing to hide. We never did,” in his own comments to CNN, was not plausible given that only 3m of more than 6m documents were released.
“It’s close to nothing when they’re deciding which documents are coming out,” he said.
The names of numerous prominent figures have appeared in the documents released to date, including Donald Trump, former president Bill Clinton, and the British former royal once known as Prince Andrew. All were former friends of Epstein, who killed himself in jail in 2019 while waiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, but have strongly denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s sexual offenses.
The Trump administration’s handling of the scandal, and efforts to try to draw a line under it, have been met with repeated criticism from Democrats who were infuriated by the justice department’s failure to comply with a 19 December deadline for the full disclosure of documents.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, told ABC on Sunday that “it’s not over and will not be over until there is full and complete transparency as demanded by the survivors, so that there can be full and complete accountability”.
Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who partnered with Massie to author the Epstein Files Transparency Act, told CNN he believed the justice department had “released at best half the documents”.
He said: “It’s frankly one of the largest scandals in my view in our country’s history. And there is a demand for elite accountability. But the survivors’ lawyers that I’ve talked to have said that the survivors are still upset. They’re upset that many of their names accidentally came out without redaction. And they want to make sure the rest of the files come out.”
Lawyers representing more than 200 of Epstein’s victims on Sunday filed court papers in New York demanding the justice department take down a website hosting the released documents that publicly identifies them, ABC News reported.
The network obtained a letter to district court judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer stating the victims were in contact with the justice department over previous redaction errors, and had “an expectation” they would not be repeated.
“That expectation was shattered on January 30, 2026, when [the] DoJ committed what may be the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in US history,” the letter said.
Massie, meanwhile, is facing massive pushback over his involvement in the bipartisan push for transparency, including moves by some Republicans to remove him from the ballot ahead of November’s midterms, and criticism from Trump, who has repeatedly called the Epstein affair “a Democrat hoax”.
The congressman remained defiant in a post on X. “It was not a hoax, I cannot be bullied, I am not done, and this is why those in power are doing everything in their power to defeat me,” he wrote.
A separate post by Massie on Sunday included a video clip of him speaking in the House in defense of the Epstein law. “How will we know if this bill has been successful? We will know when rich men are being perp walked in handcuffs to the jail. Until then, this is still a cover-up,” he said.
