Pam Bondi still can’t give release date for delayed Epstein files a month after missing deadline

Attorney General Pam Bondi has appealed for more time to release the Justice Department’s cache of files relating to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, more than a month after the December deadline passed.

In a court filing made on Tuesday, Bondi, along with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton told federal judges the department could not “provide a specific date” for when a review of the materials would be complete.

Instead they said they expect to release the files “in the near term”.

The trove of files relating to Epstein’s activities include documents, audio recordings, videos and photographs. In July last year the FBI said it all amounted to “more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence” following a review of the materials.

A law passed almost unanimously in November had ordered the department to make the documents public by 19 December 2025, with the names of any of Epstein’s victims removed before release to protect their identities.

But earlier this month the Justice Department said it had so far released 12,285 documents – less than 1 per cent – of the files, and had more than 2 million documents still in review. Tuesday’s filing stresses the scale of the task the department still has to manually go through the files.

“The Department has reviewed and redacted, as appropriate, several millions of pages of materials identified in [the] files,” it says, but also “cautions that its ongoing processes, including its quality control checks and document management system preparations, may require additional efforts to ensure the protection of victim-identifying information”.

It is unclear what these “additional efforts” may require, but the task of manually reviewing what is in the files is already engaging “hundreds of Department attorneys, agents and others”, the filing says.

Along with the sluggishness of the speed of releases so far, this raises questions over whether Bondi’s expectation to complete release of all the materials “in the near term” is realistic.

Almost all of the 200 lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York have been pulled into reviewing the Epstein files, according to a recent New York Times report.

It added that even prosecutors working on the high‑profile case against Nicolás Maduro, the ousted Venezuelan president brought to Manhattan for prosecution, were instructed to shift their focus to the document review.

Meanwhile, public frustration is building. A CNN poll conducted between 9–12 January found that few Americans are satisfied with the amount of evidence released from the Epstein files.

Most respondents believe the government is intentionally holding back information, and only 16 per cent said the Justice Department under Bondi was working to release all possible information.

The two representatives who successfully led the lengthy congressional effort to pass the legislation forcing the release of the files, Ro Khanna – a democrat from California – and Thomas Massie – a Kentucky Republican – have accused the Department of Justice of committing a “flagrant violation” of the law by failing to meet the December deadline to release the files.