Sometime this week, exact date unknown, in early-mid March, around 1,000 FBI agents were re-assigned to dig through the agency’s stash on Jeffrey Epstein and redact Donald Trump’s name.
FBI Director Kash Patel pressured hundreds of FBI employees, “including special agents from the Washington, DC and New York field offices” to scrutinize over 100,000 Epstein files. They were joined alongside Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) analysts and the FBI Enterprise Vetting Center.
Many of the Epstein files that FBI agents and FOIA analysts have been reviewing over the past two weeks center on the 2019 sex trafficking case against Epstein in the Southern District of New York. The FBI employees have been poring over transcripts of witnesses and other individuals who were interviewed and scrutinizing details about victims that may be disclosed.
Bloomberg
The FBI came across several instances in which Trump was mentioned in the documents. FOIA officers redacted, or blacked out, Trump’s name in what they believe is in accordance with exemptions 6, which protects personal privacy, and 7, which protects personal information found in law enforcement records — two of the nine exemptions that FOIA officers employ when balancing the public’s right to know, the privacy of individuals named in the documents under review, and national security.
However, the justification to redact Trump’s name is shaky. The FOIA agents redacted Trump’s name specifically because the federal investigation against Jeffrey Epstein was launched in 2006, when Trump was a private citizen. However, precedent would lead to Trump’s name getting revealed. His son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr., had his name redacted under the Mueller investigation report. This redaction was also justified by 6 and 7. However, his name was eventually unredacted after journalist Jason Leopold and his lawyers questioned the move. Trump Jr.’s status as a private citizen during the first Trump campaign was not enough to protect him, and there is little reason why Trump Senior’s name should be redacted too.
After the excessive redaction of the Epstein files, the Justice Department and the FBI released a July 8 joint statement that they uncovered “more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence related to the Epstein investigation.”
“While we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein,” the statement read, “it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” The officials added that “much of the information is subject to court-ordered sealing.”
Bloomberg
This statement fueled the fire of the civil war within Trump’s MAGA movement.
Patel’s order to rummage through the Epstein files is the result of Attorney General Pam Bondi humiliating herself and the administration on February 27. She held a “highly publicized” White House event in which Bondi would supposedly release the declassified Epstein files to the public for the first time. However, these files were already publicized. It only contained 200 pages of documents out of the over 100,000 known to exist. Many of the documents given by Bondi originated from Epstein’s “black book,” which had itself largely derived from Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial which happened four years before. Trump’s name is listed as a contact within this “black book.”
It just so happened that on that same day, Bondi learned from a “source” that there were thousands of withheld Epstein documents in the FBI’s New York field office. Bondi ordered Patel to “deliver the full and complete Epstein files to my office.” She also demanded Patel to investigate why the FBI did not give the Epstein files that she had previously requested. It is unknown if the FBI even completed or delivered that report.
This engineered crisis would result in the retirement of the section chief of the FBI’s Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), Michael Seidel. After Seidel pushed back on Patel’s directives, which saw FBI employees work for as much as two straight weeks and resort to sleeping on their desks, he was given the choice to retire or face termination. He opted for the former.
