Congrats to Todd Blanche on His First Epstein Lawsuit as Acting AG!
As sure as night follows day and feud follows the Beckhams, legal troubles relating to the Epstein files seem to always follow Trump’s attorneys general. How curious!
On Tuesday, lawyer and journalist Katie Phang sued Acting AG Todd Blanche over the Justice Department’s gross mishandling of the Epstein files, arguing that the DOJ’s failure to upload the documents in full was hurting her ability to do her job as a journalist. The 15-page lawsuit calls Blanche out for his “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” referring to the legislation that was signed into law by Trump in November, and with absolutely no thanks to House Speaker Mike Johnson. It required the DOJ to upload the Epstein files in full by Dec. 19, which, spoiler alert—it didn’t.
To recap: That same day, the DOJ drip-fed a speckle of heavily redacted documents before announcing it would be missing its own deadline. Three days later, it dumped 30,000 (very heavily redacted) files onto its website. Then, more than a month later, it dumped another three million pages, which were riddled with errors, and exposed the details and nude images of several Epstein survivors. There were “literally 1000s of mistakes,” one of the victims’ lawyers said at the time. In February, NPR revealed that the DOJ was also still withholding files, despite Blanche declaring that the January dump “mark[ed] the end” of the files.
“The Act…required the government to produce these documents within 30 days of its enactment—not later than December 19, 2025,” Brendan Ballou, Phang’s lawyer, wrote in the lawsuit. “That required production never occurred.”
The move comes months after Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) attempted to turn to the courts to call the DOJ out on its handling of the Epstein files, demanding an “independent monitor” to complete the release of all other documents. While a federal judge said he couldn’t allow that, he did leave the door open for a separate lawsuit to force the DOJ to comply with the law. Which Phang did. “I am tired of the DOJ violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” she wrote in her Substack announcing the lawsuit.
A personal lawsuit over the Epstein files is a milestone that former AG Pam Bondi, who was ousted from her post earlier this month, never hit. She was, however, subpoenaed for a House deposition in March, though she’s since tried to weasel her way out of it, claiming she doesn’t have to since she’s no longer AG. (In a separate House Oversight Committee hearing in February, when she was confronted by nearly a dozen Epstein victims, she dismissed them as “theatrics.”) And while Blanche is quite literally no better than Bondi when it comes to the Epstein files—not only because he was No. 2 at the DOJ for all of last year, but because he’s Ghislaine Maxwell’s biggest bitch in the administration—I guess we now know of one milestone he’s hit that’s all his own.