Prosecutors in Poland, Norway and Latvia and police in Britain say the US Justice Department has not answered their requests for Epstein evidence, one year after the first files were released.

Norway has charged three former senior officials over their dealings with Epstein, Latvia's police have identified a victim on their territory and Polish prosecutors have opened a trafficking investigation. No charge has followed the files in the United States.

Marianne Bender, a state prosecutor at Norway's economic crime unit Økokrim, reports that the US Justice Department "have not at this time approved the request" her office made for records.

Epstein died in federal custody in August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal rape trafficking charges. The documents seized from him, released in batches from September 2025, name people and institutions across Europe and have set off criminal inquiries in Norway, Poland, Latvia, France and the United Kingdom.

Todd Blanche, who runs the department those requests are addressed to, spent 2023 and 2024 as Donald Trump's personal criminal defence lawyer.

Norway's corruption charges

Økokrim charged former prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland with gross corruption on 12 February, four days after charging former UN ambassador Mona Juul with serious corruption and her husband, the former diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, with complicity. Police searched Jagland's properties the same week. All three deny wrongdoing.

John Christian Elden, who represents Rød-Larsen, told the Washington Post he was "very pleased that Norwegian prosecutors have requested surrender of relevant records" from the department. Norwegian prosecutors have also asked for investigative steps at the International Peace Institute in New York, which Rød-Larsen led.

Elden said the case against his client rests on a selectively chosen set of documents from the Epstein seizure, which is why the defence wants the rest of the file.

Poland's unanswered request

Poland's National Prosecutor's Office sent its request on 27 April and has had no reply, spokesman Przemysław Nowak said. The office asked for unredacted documents from the files relating to Polish aspects of the case.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in February that Poland would investigate, including possible links between Epstein and Russian intelligence. Prosecutors opened their trafficking investigation on 10 March. Rzeczpospolita reported in August that the police team assigned to the Polish threads had established nothing in six months.

Latvia and Britain

Latvia's State Police opened a criminal proceeding and identified one victim in the country in May. Spokeswoman Simona Gravite said investigators had "sent several requests for mutual legal assistance to the relevant authorities in the United States" and had received no reply.

The Metropolitan Police submitted a formal request for unredacted files after informal contacts with the department produced nothing, the Times reported in May. Officers opened an investigation in February into Peter Mandelson, a former ambassador to the United States, on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Mandelson resigned from the House of Lords on 3 February and was arrested on 23 February. He denies wrongdoing and has not been charged. The Crown Prosecution Service declined to comment.

The Telegraph reported on 21 August that neither the department nor the FBI had answered the request, and that detectives feared the case could collapse without the unredacted material.

The department's answer

A Justice Department spokesperson told the Telegraph the department "has not refused to assist any jurisdiction investigating potential criminal conduct related to Jeffrey Epstein" and said it remains committed to co-operating with all jurisdictions pursuing potential crimes. The same sentence, word for word, appeared in the department's response to the Washington Post three weeks later. The department says it does not comment on the status of individual requests.

The Criminal Division's Office of International Affairs processes incoming requests from foreign governments. The department's own inspector general reported on 22 July 2021 that the office's staffing had stayed flat despite increased hiring because of high attrition, that it had no hiring and retention plan and that it still ran on an antiquated case management system after $3.57 million was spent on a replacement that was never completed.

Samer Korkor, a white-collar defence lawyer who worked in the office, told the Washington Post that such requests are inherently complex and that the complexity rises where records are voluminous and redactions contested.

The man who decides

Blanche resigned his partnership at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in April 2023 to defend Trump against the Manhattan district attorney. "I have been asked to represent Trump in the recently charged DA case, and after much thought/consideration, I have decided it is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity I should not pass up," he wrote to colleagues. "Doing this as a partner at Cadwalader was not an option."

He led the defence at the New York falsifying business records trial, which opened on 22 April 2024 and ended on 30 May 2024 in conviction on all 34 counts. He acted for Trump in both special counsel prosecutions, the classified records case in Florida and the 2020 election case in the District of Columbia, each abandoned after the 2024 election. Trump nominated him deputy attorney general on 14 November 2024, six months after the New York verdict. The Senate confirmed him 52 to 46 on 5 March 2025.

Trump fired Pam Bondi on 2 April 2026 and Blanche took the department in an acting capacity. The Senate confirmed him attorney general 50 to 49 in an overnight vote on 8 August 2026, with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski the only Republicans opposed.

At his confirmation hearing on 15 July 2026, Blanche said of Trump "I'm his lawyer," then corrected himself to "was his lawyer." He said: "I'm not sure there's very many people who have ever had a criminal defense attorney who calls that person their friend." Asked on NBC's Meet the Press, broadcast on 16 August 2026, whether he would pledge to act independently of the president, he said: "There's a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case and act independently of the White House. No, I'm not going to pledge that."

CNN reported on 14 May 2026 that Joseph Tirrell, the department's top ethics lawyer, briefed Blanche within two weeks of his arrival as deputy attorney general in March 2025 and advised him to recuse from department matters involving Trump personally, citing the regulation barring participation where an official has a personal or political relationship with a party. Tirrell was dismissed in July 2025. A department spokesperson said Blanche "is recused from many cases before DOJ" but declined to say which. CNN's account is the only public record of the advice, and it does not extend to Epstein or Maxwell matters.

Bondi and Blanche told Trump in May 2025 that his name appeared multiple times in the Epstein files and told him of their plan not to release further documents, the Wall Street Journal reported on 23 July 2025. In a joint statement the two said "nothing in the files warranted further investigation or prosecution". White House spokesman Steven Cheung called the report "fake news". No primary document supporting the briefing has surfaced.

Blanche and Maxwell

Blanche interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell himself over two days at Tallahassee on 24 and 25 July 2025, roughly nine hours in total, with an FBI assistant special agent in charge, a US marshal and an acting associate deputy attorney general present. He granted her immunity for what she said. "Whatever you talk about today, you have what's called immunity," he told her, according to the transcript the department released on 22 August 2025.

Maxwell's lawyer asked for the meeting, according to the same transcript. "Mr. Markus reached out to me and said that, that you wanted to speak with somebody from the government," Blanche said, referring to David Oscar Markus. Blanche had publicly framed the approach as the department's own.

Markus and Blanche are friends. Blanche appeared twice on Markus's podcast "For The Defense" in June 2024, discussing his work for Trump, NPR reported on 29 July 2025.

Maxwell told Blanche she had never seen Trump in a massage setting or anything she considered inappropriate and that he was "a gentleman in all respects". She said: "I like him, and I've always liked him."

Senators Richard Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse wrote to Blanche on 28 July 2025 that "it is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for the Deputy Attorney General to conduct such an interview," and that his claim the meeting was the first time the department had reached out to Maxwell was false. Seven days after the second interview, on 1 August 2025, the Bureau of Prisons moved Maxwell from a Florida facility to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum-security women's camp in Texas.

Virginia Giuffre's relatives said Maxwell "must remain in prison, anything less would go down in history as being one of the highest travesties of justice."

Markus told Forbes on 17 April 2026 that there is "a good chance and for good reason that she would get a pardon" and that "I don't think now is the best time to do it, with everything going on." Blanche told Senator Chris Van Hollen at a Senate Appropriations hearing on 19 May 2026 that he could commit the department would not recommend a pardon for Maxwell. He declined to make the same commitment for all individuals named in the files. The pledge binds the department's recommendation, not the president's power to act. Senator Jacky Rosen passed a resolution opposing clemency for Maxwell on 29 July 2026.

Judge Paul Engelmayer denied Maxwell's petition to vacate her conviction on 25 August 2026, writing that the released files, "far from exculpating her, it incriminates her". No pardon or commutation has been granted.

What Congress ordered and what the department did

Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025, the House voting 427 to 1 on 18 November and the Senate clearing it by unanimous consent, requiring the Attorney General to publish every unclassified department record on Epstein and Maxwell within 30 days of Trump's signature on 19 November. The statute bars withholding on grounds of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity. The deadline fell on 19 December 2025.

Several hundred thousand pages appeared that month. A further release on 30 January 2026 brought the published total to nearly 3.5 million pages, more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. Roughly 200,000 pages were redacted or withheld on deliberative process, work product and attorney-client grounds, none of which appear among the act's listed exceptions. Blanche said it would be the last major release. Oversight Democrats put the department's total holdings at about 6 million documents.

Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia has produced every compliance ruling under the act, in a suit brought against Blanche on 27 April 2026 by the lawyer and legal journalist Katie Phang. He granted a preliminary injunction on 25 June 2026, finding that by declining to answer Phang's arguments the attorney general had "conceded that he is in violation of the Act". The department disputes that any concession was made, calling it a "perverse interpretation" produced by a local procedural rule.

Department lawyers hand-delivered 10 documents to the courthouse at 2.28pm on 30 July, minutes inside a deadline Sullivan had set after refusing two attempts to delay. At a hearing on 13 August, department counsel Andrew Block could not tell the court who had decided that certain FBI interview records were duplicative, could not document the assertion that victims' lawyers had asked for particular redactions, and could not give a date for producing anything.

"The public has a right to know what the hell is going on in this case," Sullivan said. On contempt: "I don't want to do it, but I will do it to ensure justice is fairly administered. That's not a threat, that's a promise." He read into the record the citation from the 2008 prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens, in which he held three senior prosecutors in contempt after the government withheld exculpatory documents.

Sullivan gave Blanche 10 days to explain under oath why the material had not been released. The department noticed an appeal to the DC Circuit on 24 August, one day after that window closed, and told Sullivan on 27 August that a report Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward had signed on 21 August and published in the Federal Register that day had discharged the obligation. "Therefore, no declaration, or any further action, is needed," the filing said. The document carries the heading of a report to Congress and bears the date 14 February, six months before it appeared.

Phang replied on 2 September, asking Sullivan to review the withheld notes personally and disputing that the Federal Register publication satisfies the statute, which requires a written justification for every individual redaction. Her lawyers have asked the court to fine Blanche $1,000 a day. No contempt has been entered, no fine ordered and no ruling issued. Initial submissions in the appeal, docketed as No. 26-5299, are due on 24 September.

Eight or more email exchanges discussing a video of torture and rape involving young women and minors are still withheld, along with 37 pages of handwritten FBI interview notes from a woman who alleges Trump raped her as a child, a draft Florida indictment with co-conspirator names blacked out and the complete log of every redaction made to the published files. Trump denies the allegation and has never been charged over it. The department says it cannot locate an unredacted copy of the draft indictment, and told the court that technical limitations prevent removing victim information from handwritten notes. Sullivan asked why they cannot be redacted by hand.

Foreign-language material covered by the act has not begun to appear, more than seven months after the January release, and the department has given the court no schedule for it.

The victims

Alexander Acosta, then US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, signed the non-prosecution agreement in September 2007 that ended the federal investigation of Epstein and extended immunity to four named co-conspirators. Epstein pleaded to two state offences and served 13 months in a Palm Beach County jail with work release.

The Eleventh Circuit found that prosecutors "worked hand-in-hand with Epstein's lawyers, or at the very least acceded to their requests, to keep the NPA's existence and terms hidden from victims". Four months after signing it, the same office wrote to one of the girls it covered to say the case was "currently under investigation".

Judge Kenneth Marra ruled on 21 February 2019 that the government had violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act. On 16 September 2019 he declined to rescind the agreement, holding that he could not void the co-conspirator immunity because those parties were not before him, and that damages are not available under the statute. The Eleventh Circuit sitting en banc held on 15 April 2021 that the act "does not authorize a victim to seek judicial enforcement of her CVRA rights in a freestanding civil action". More than 30 women and girls were identified as victims of the conduct the agreement covered. None obtained a remedy.

The department's Office of Professional Responsibility reported in November 2020 that Acosta's decision "constitutes poor judgment", that no prosecutor had committed professional misconduct and that "the victims were not treated with the forthrightness and sensitivity expected by the Department". Acosta had by then served as Trump's labour secretary for two years, resigning on 12 July 2019 after Epstein's arrest in New York.

Bradley Edwards and Brittany Henderson, who represent Epstein's accusers, wrote to Judge Richard Berman on 26 November 2025 asking for court-ordered identity protections before the December release. "These women are not political pawns. They are mothers, wives, and daughters," they wrote. The two later asked judges to order the department's files website shut down over redaction failures that exposed minors.

Sky Roberts, Virginia Giuffre's brother, said on 3 February 2026 that the department was "redacting the names of perpetrators and they're unredacting the names of victims, quite the opposite of what the Epstein Files Transparency Act was meant to do."

Representative Pramila Jayapal asked survivors seated behind Bondi at a House Judiciary hearing on 11 February 2026 to raise their hands if the department had never met them. All of them did. Jayapal asked Bondi to turn around and apologise. "Why didn't she ask Merrick Garland this twice when he sat in my chair?" Bondi said. "I'm not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics."

Blanche met survivors for about an hour at department headquarters on 16 July 2026, the day after his confirmation hearing, at the insistence of Senator Thom Tillis, who had made it a condition of his committee vote. Annie Farmer, who testified at Maxwell's trial, said afterwards: "I found him abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors." She said he would not commit to investigating the report her sister made to the FBI in 1996. Dani Bensky said: "He danced around his wording, repeatedly interrupted us and could not commit to anything that would demonstrate good faith or begin to restore trust."

Farmer told NOTUS on 4 September 2026: "There's just not an interest. They want to move on and turn the page."

Trump, Epstein and Maxwell

Trump told New York magazine on 28 October 2002: "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it, Jeffrey enjoys his social life."

NBC footage shot at Mar-a-Lago in November 1992 shows the two men watching and pointing at dancing women, Trump whispering to Epstein, who laughs. Photographs place them together at the Harley Davidson Cafe opening in October 1993, at Trump's wedding to Marla Maples that December, at Mar-a-Lago in 1997 and at a Victoria's Secret event in 1999. A Davidoff Studios frame dated 12 February 2000 shows Trump, Melania Knauss, Epstein and Maxwell together at Mar-a-Lago.

Flight logs released by the department in February 2025 record Trump on eight legs of Epstein's aircraft between April 1993 and January 1997, seven journeys in all, with Maxwell logged on four of them. The 5 January 1997 leg, unsealed as an exhibit in Giuffre v Maxwell, lists Trump, Epstein, Maxwell, Glenn and Eva Dubin and Mark Epstein aboard a Gulfstream II, tail number N908JE. A prosecutor's email dated 7 January 2020, released on 23 December 2025, records that Trump flew on Epstein's jet at least eight times in the 1990s with Maxwell present on at least four. One flight logged Epstein, Trump and a then 20-year-old whose name is redacted. Trump wrote during the 2024 campaign: "I was never on Epstein's Plane, or at his 'stupid' Island." The logs record no Trump flight to the Virgin Islands.

House Oversight Democrats released a leather-bound album on 8 September 2025 that Maxwell compiled for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003, produced by the Epstein estate under subpoena. A page bearing Trump's name carries a typewritten dialogue framed by the outline of a naked woman and ends: "A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret." Trump said: "These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don't draw pictures." He sued Dow Jones, News Corp and Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion on 18 July 2025 over the Wall Street Journal story that first reported the letter. Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the suit without prejudice on 13 April 2026 for failure to plead actual malice. Trump amended and the defendants moved again to dismiss. Gayles stayed all discovery on 5 August 2026 and has issued no ruling.

Epstein wrote to Maxwell in April 2011: "I want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned." He wrote to the author Michael Wolff on 31 January 2019: "Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop." House Oversight Democrats released both on 12 November 2025. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the committee "selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump", said Giuffre had stated Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing and said Trump had thrown Epstein out of his club decades ago.

Trump said of Maxwell at a White House briefing on 21 July 2020, three weeks after her arrest: "I don't know, I really haven't been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly. I've met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach."

Trump posted on 14 November 2025 that the department should investigate Epstein's ties to Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman and JPMorgan Chase. Bondi assigned it that day to Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York.

"I'm the chief law enforcement officer of the country. I'm allowed to do it," Trump said. No outcome of that investigation has been made public.

The allegations in the files

A South Carolina woman telephoned the FBI tip line on 10 July 2019, two days after Epstein's arrest, and agents interviewed her four times that year, on 24 July, 7 August, 20 August and 16 October. She told them she was about 13 when a man she knew only as "Jeff" began abusing her on Hilton Head Island in the early 1980s, that he drugged her, that Polaroid photographs of her naked were kept in a drawer and that the abuse ran over two or three years.

Epstein took her off the island when she was between 13 and 15 and brought her to New York or New Jersey, she told agents on 7 August 2019. She was "introduced to someone with money, money... It was Donald Trump." Others were in the room, in a very tall building, and left when Trump asked them to. He said something to the effect of "Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be," the typed FBI summary records, unzipped his trousers and put her head "down to his penis". She bit him. He "pulled her hair and punched her on the side of her head". Trump denies wrongdoing, no charge has been brought, the FBI opened no investigation into the allegation and it is not mentioned in the first of her four interviews. The Post and Courier, which reviewed about 30 pages of the records, could not corroborate the Trump allegations, and one of the friends she had named recalled nothing untoward. A Justice Department source told the Miami Herald that agents interviewed her four times and found her credible.

Handwritten notes from three of those four interviews, 37 pages, are the records Blanche has told the court are duplicative of the typed summaries. Twenty-two of the pages were posted without redactions to the document-sharing site Scribd on 6 March 2026 by Kaelan Deese, a reporter at the conservative Washington Examiner, carrying the woman's real name, her family details and the names of the childhood friends she had given the bureau in confidence. Nobody noticed for five months. Deese said the material came from a source within the Justice Department, according to screenshots of a text exchange obtained by the researcher Rye Howard-Stone, who wrote that the screenshots could not be independently authenticated. Neither the FBI nor any court has authenticated the leaked pages, and the writer Amy Gabrielle found identifier numbers, fonts and letter spacing inconsistent with the department's own files.

A second claim involving Trump sits in a Justice Department presentation prepared in the summer of 2025, around the time Blanche interviewed Maxwell. Epstein introduced a 14-year-old girl to Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 1994 with the words "This is a good one, right?", to which Trump agreed, according to a slide in that presentation, first reported by the journalist Roger Sollenberger. The account came from a government witness at Maxwell's trial whose testimony helped convict her. Trump denies wrongdoing and has never been charged over it. The presentation has not been released and Sollenberger's report is the only public account of it.

Material released on 31 January 2026 includes an internal FBI email of August 2025 naming Trump among men said to have salacious information held against them, unvetted tips alleging conduct with girls as young as 13 and 14, and a woman's FBI interview saying Maxwell presented her to Trump at a New York party. The department attached a disclaimer to the production: "This production may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos... Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false." Blanche said the department "did not find credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation."

Counts of how often Trump's name appears vary by what is being counted. The phase-one release of February 2025 carried his name nine times. A New York Times review of the roughly 3 million pages published on 30 and 31 January 2026 found more than 38,000 mentions across more than 5,300 files, a figure that includes press clippings and duplicated documents. The CBC published its own count alongside an explanation of why the number means little on its own.

Trump said after the March 2026 release: "I have nothing to hide. I've been exonerated." Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, has called the allegations "completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence" and said the previous administration's Justice Department "knew about them for four years and did nothing with them".

The officials on the list

The report Woodward signed on 21 August and published in the Federal Register on 27 August, at 91 FR 55356, contains an appendix listing government officials and politically exposed persons named in the reviewed material. The appendix runs to six pages reproduced as scanned images rather than text. A substantively equivalent list of about 300 names went to Congress in February 2026 and was published in full by Newsweek on 19 February.

Serving and former Trump administration figures on that list include Trump, Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Mehmet Oz, Mike Huckabee, Acosta, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, FBI Director Kash Patel, Bondi, Blanche, former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, special representative Paolo Zampolli and Woodward himself. The department's own caveat, which belongs beside every name on it, reads: "some individuals had extensive direct email contact with Epstein or Maxwell while other individuals are mentioned only in a portion of a document (including press reporting) that on its face is unrelated to the Epstein and Maxwell matters."

Lutnick appears in emails from December 2012, released in the January 2026 tranche, arranging a family lunch at Little St James. "Ok, lunch on Sunday. See you then," he wrote. His wife Allison wrote on 21 December 2012: "We are looking forward to visiting you." Lutnick bought the house adjoining Epstein's East 71st Street property in 1997 and the two invested together in an advertising company in 2013. He told House Oversight in a deposition on 6 May 2026, released on 13 May, that he met Epstein three times and did not know for years that Epstein was a registered sex offender. A Commerce Department spokesperson said Lutnick had "limited interactions with Mr. Epstein in the presence of his wife and has never been accused of wrongdoing."

Patel appears in FBI records released in August 2026 in an exchange from March 2025, days after his swearing-in, in which a legal attaché passed on contact details for the socialite Victoria Hervey at the request of Sarah Ferguson. "Remind me who Victoria Harvey is?" Patel replied. The emails contain no reference to Epstein.

Zampolli, appointed special representative for global partnerships on 11 March 2025, appears in Epstein emails released to House Oversight and in FBI proffer notes taken in July 2019 describing repeated business contact. "I never had any personal engagement with Mr. Epstein. It was part of the New York scene, that's it," he told Newsweek on 25 April 2026.

Melania Trump issued a statement on 9 April 2026: "The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today."

The Democracy Defenders Fund complained on 6 February 2026 that only a handful of communications from Bondi, Blanche and Patel appear in the release despite their roles in it. "This is a tired narrative," a department spokesperson said. "Just because you wish something to be true, doesn't mean it is."

The accusations from Congress

Thomas Massie told the Reason podcast on 11 February 2026, hours after questioning Bondi at a House Judiciary hearing, that the attorney general had committed a crime. "It's criminal. She's broken the law," he said. "They've been utterly incompetent. Incompetent to the point that it almost seems like you'd have to be doing this on purpose to be this incompetent." At the hearing itself he told her: "You don't have to go back to Biden. Let's go back to Obama, let's go back to George Bush. This cover-up spans decades and you are responsible for this portion of it."

Massie went further on NBC's Meet the Press on 24 May 2026, five days after losing his primary to a Trump-endorsed challenger. "Todd Blanche is violating the law; there's still millions of files they haven't released," he said. "I don't think it's possible to get to convictions with Todd Blanche at the top, and with the FBI Director Kash Patel at the top, because they've effectively both perjured themselves by saying that there's nobody else in the files." He had posted on 3 April 2026, the day after Blanche took the department: "Congratulations AG Blanche. Now you have 30 days to release the rest of the files before becoming criminally liable for failure to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act."

Massie told MSNBC, in remarks reported on 3 September 2025: "I think the best way to clear President Trump's name is to release all the files. I actually don't think he's done anything criminal; I think he may be covering for some rich and powerful people that are friends of his." On ABC's This Week on 15 February 2026 he said: "Donald Trump told us... that he would be transparent, but he's not. He's still in with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration and they're attacking me for trying to get these files released."

Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned her Georgia seat on 5 January 2026, six weeks after supplying one of four Republican signatures on the first discharge petition. "The president called me a traitor because I stood with the victims of Jeffrey Epstein," she told ABC in Australia in an interview published on 2 March 2026. "What happened is the American people reacted in such outrage. I'm talking about extreme outrage over the cover-up." She told CNN in June 2026: "We should consider them traitors. They're traitors, the ones that refuse to release the Epstein files, want to cover up for pedophiles and rapists and all sorts of disgusting things in these files."

James Comer, the Republican who chairs House Oversight, told CNN on 30 March 2026: "Well, I think the Justice Department has botched this. I don't think anyone in America, Republican or avid Trump supporter, would defend the way that this has been rolled out." He told the Daily Signal in an interview published on 3 September 2026: "The government failed, and that's what, when we wrap all this up, that's going to be the conclusion: The government failed the victims."

Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski gave written reasons for opposing Blanche's confirmation. "Mr. Blanche has taken several actions that have further eroded the Department's independence, and that is the basis for my vote to oppose his confirmation," Collins said. Murkowski said: "The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration. I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case."

Ted Lieu and Dan Goldman, both former prosecutors, wrote to Blanche on 20 February 2026 asking him to appoint a special counsel to investigate Bondi. "Attorney General Bondi committed the crime of making false statements under oath, under 18 U.S.C. § 1001," they wrote. "When confronted with her lie, she did not retract her statement, she doubled down. America cannot have a liar and a criminal as our top law enforcement officer." At the 11 February hearing Lieu had told Bondi: "I'm going to put up another document from a witness who called the FBI national threat operation center because I believe you just lied under oath." He also asked her: "I want to know, were there any underage girls at that party or any party that Trump attended with Jeffrey Epstein."

Lieu said at a news conference in early February 2026 that the files contain "highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children." Snopes and Lead Stories both rated as false a paraphrase then circulating that had him saying the files show Trump raping children. His word was allegations.

Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on House Judiciary, opened the 11 February hearing by telling Bondi: "You're running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Justice Department." He said she had been ordered by subpoena to turn over 6 million documents, photographs and videos and had produced 3 million, and that "in the half you did produce, you redacted the names of abusers, enablers, accomplices and coconspirators, apparently to spare them embarrassment and disgrace," while publishing victims' names and images. "You acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference and jaded cruelty towards more than 1,000 victims raped, abused and trafficked," he said. "This performance screams cover-up."

Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on House Oversight, said on 24 February 2026 that he had reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the department the day before. "Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes," he said. "Covering up direct evidence of a potential assault by the President of the United States is the most serious possible crime in this White House cover up." He said of Blanche on 12 August 2026, four days after the confirmation vote: "In one of his first acts as Attorney General, Todd Blanche launched a plan to hide Donald Trump's crimes and corruption from the American people, and obstruct our Epstein investigation."

Raskin and Garcia said jointly on 19 December 2025, the day the statutory deadline produced several hundred thousand pages: "Donald Trump and the Department of Justice are now violating federal law as they continue covering up the facts and the evidence about Jeffrey Epstein's decades-long, billion-dollar, international sex trafficking ring."

Chuck Schumer told the Senate on 26 February 2026 that the handling "has all the stench of a coverup" and asked: "What else is the administration keeping behind a lock and key? Is this incompetence or is it a full-blown coverup?" Dick Durbin said on 20 December 2025: "After mishandling the Epstein files all year, the Trump Administration is now violating federal law to protect the rich and powerful. It took an act of Congress to force Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino to even consider providing justice. They had a choice: survivors or Donald Trump. They chose the latter."

Sheldon Whitehouse wrote to Bondi and Patel on 9 March 2026 demanding they preserve every record relating to the department's handling of the allegations against Trump, reminding them that the Federal Records Act "imposes an obligation to preserve federal records on all DOJ employees, including FBI employees, and makes violations subject to criminal prosecution."

Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on Senate Finance, wrote to Blanche in a letter released on 18 March 2026: "By withholding this unclassified document from the U.S. Congress, you are covering up for pedophiles." His staff published a report on 4 August 2026 that refers 13 named bankers at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank for investigation by federal prosecutors and financial regulators. None of the 13 has been charged in any jurisdiction. "My small team of investigators did what Trump's attorney general and Treasury secretary said was impossible: they connected the dots and found evidence of multiple crimes related to Epstein's associates," Wyden said.

Ro Khanna was asked at a Zeteo event in the District of Columbia on 22 January 2026 whether what he was seeing was a cover-up. "Yes," he said. "It's just politically, malpractice, unless you have something to hide. And so, the question is, what is there to hide?"

Richard Blumenthal and Murkowski announced an inspector general audit of the department's compliance on 24 April 2026 in wording neither of them used elsewhere. "In light of the continued stonewalling, an independent assessment of the Department of Justice's apparent refusal to release the full Epstein files is vital," their joint statement said. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, has gone no further than saying on CNN on 18 November 2025 that "these Epstein files that Donald Trump and his administration has been hiding for months need to be released."

Bondi told Jayapal at the February hearing: "I'm not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics." A department spokesperson said in February 2026, of the complaint that few of Bondi's, Blanche's and Patel's own communications appear in the release: "This is a tired narrative. Just because you wish something to be true, doesn't mean it is." The department said in April 2026: "There are no missing pages and the Department categorically rejects this media-created myth." Blanche said at his confirmation hearing that the department "undertook a herculean task to review millions and millions of potentially responsive files" and that "that doesn't excuse the mistakes, of which I take responsibility."

New Mexico gets the same answer

Raúl Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico, reopened the state's criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch on 19 February 2026, seven years after the state closed it at federal request, then searched the property on 9 March. The released files contain more than 13,000 references to Zorro Ranch and about 5,000 to New Mexico as places where victims were trafficked and assaulted. A state survivors commission reported on 6 August 2026 that it had confirmed evidence Epstein abused five women and girls there between 1996 and 2012 and had identified at least 30 further potential victims it could not confirm because federal records are redacted.

Torrez sued the department and Blanche on 5 August 2026 after 10 formal requests went unmet. The complaint runs from 14 May 2019, when New Mexico first notified federal prosecutors of its investigation, through a 23 July 2019 instruction to stand down, to a response on 30 June 2026 in which the District of New Mexico produced 31 pages consisting of follow-up interview questions, news articles, press releases and correspondence. The Southern District of New York produced nothing.

"Every day that the USDOJ withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes," Torrez said. "Witnesses relocate and become unreachable. Memories, already strained by years of trauma, fade further." A department spokesperson said protecting victim privacy remains a priority and that protective orders entered in New York prevent sweeping disclosure. No ruling has issued.

Poland, Latvia and the United Kingdom each hold a bilateral mutual legal assistance treaty with the United States, supplemented by the EU instrument that took effect on 1 February 2010. The department's published treaty list records no bilateral treaty with Norway.

Both the United States and Norway are parties to the UN Palermo convention, whose article 18 commits parties to afford one another the widest measure of mutual legal assistance in investigations of covered offences, trafficking among them. Article 18 permits refusal on specified grounds, and requires a state that refuses to give reasons.

Germany

Germany's federal criminal police have asked the FBI to bring German authorities into any case with relevant German connections, and the government has said the police office holds no information on criminally relevant German links, according to the Washington Post. Green Party lawmakers Konstantin von Notz and Irene Mihalic have pressed the government to open an investigation.

Von Notz said on 6 February that German prosecutors should examine the released documents closely and ask US authorities for more. Mihalic said: "This is not the time to sit around twiddling your thumbs and hoping that the worst will pass you by." The Bundestag debated possible German links to the files in March.

No charge in the United States

Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, told NPR on 3 April 2026: "You can't charge someone for a crime without sufficient evidence, and I have yet to see evidence of a crime involving an Epstein associate that has gone uncharged." The department says no prosecution has followed because there has been no credible evidence that Epstein's activities extended to a network.

House Oversight Republicans referred two men to the department for criminal investigation on 4 June 2026, the former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine and the hairstylist Frédéric Fekkai, in a letter signed by James Comer, Clay Higgins, William Timmons, Andy Biggs and Lauren Boebert. Both deny wrongdoing. No response from the department has been made public, and neither man has been charged.

Thomas Massie read 14 names on the House floor on 31 August 2026 as people he said should be investigated and prosecuted, and filed a discharge petition the same night on a second transparency bill that would give state attorneys general, district attorneys, victims and members of Congress standing to sue the Attorney General. Ro Khanna, a co-sponsor, said on 1 September: "Survivors have not gotten prosecutions, and they have not gotten access to some of the FBI forms." None of the living people Massie named has been charged.