The Justice Department filed notice of appeal on 24 August against a court order requiring it to lift redactions from Epstein files, one day after the deadline expired on a sworn declaration a federal judge in the District of Columbia had ordered its lawyers to produce, and 11 days after the same judge warned them he would hold them in contempt.

Judge Emmet Sullivan told the department at a hearing on 13 August that it had failed to justify withholding records the Epstein Files Transparency Act obliges it to publish, and gave Attorney General Todd Blanche 10 days to explain under oath why the material had not been released. Sullivan had already found in June that Blanche's office conceded a violation of the act by declining to answer the plaintiff's arguments on the merits.

Blanche was confirmed as attorney general on 8 August in a narrow overnight Senate vote, five days before the hearing, having run the department in an acting capacity since Trump fired Pam Bondi on 2 April. He is the defendant in the case in his official capacity, and his own handling of the Epstein files ran through his confirmation fight.

"The public has a right to know what the hell is going on in this case," Sullivan said at the hearing, according to Courthouse News Service.
On contempt he said: "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."

Katie Phang, an attorney and legal journalist, filed the suit in April in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging the department had not met the act's disclosure mandate. Sullivan granted a preliminary injunction on 25 June in a 48-page opinion, giving the department until 2 July either to publish specific unredacted documents or to show cause why it should not.

The appeal to the D.C. Circuit puts the department's own compliance with a statute Trump signed on 19 November 2025 before an appellate court, and freezes the release of records that include FBI notes touching the president.

Eight or more email exchanges discussing a video of torture and sexual activity involving young women and minors sit among the disputed redactions, alongside 37 pages of handwritten FBI interview notes from a woman who made unsubstantiated allegations against Trump, who denies wrongdoing, a draft Epstein indictment from Florida with co-conspirator names blacked out, a 2019 email referring to redacted co-conspirators and a complete log of every redaction made to the published files.

Department lawyers say the blacked-out material protects the identities of co-conspirators rather than victims, that the act's victim-protection carve-out therefore covers it and that the redactions were lawful throughout. A department spokesperson said Blanche "has not conceded anything" and called Sullivan's reading a "perverse interpretation" aimed at "driving misleading headlines".

What the department could not answer

DOJ counsel Andrew Block told the court that technical limitations prevent the removal of victim information from handwritten notes, and Sullivan directed the department to explain why those notes cannot be redacted by hand.

Block could not say who had decided that specific FBI interview records were duplicative of material already published, or produce documentation for the department's assertion that lawyers for victims had requested particular redactions. Sullivan noted that the act contains no exception for duplicative records, and told Block he should have brought someone who could answer.

"You can't give the court a time frame, 30 days, 60 days, whatever?" Sullivan asked. Block said the dates were outside his control.

Brendan Ballou, appearing for Phang, said: "The Justice Department itself made clear that the Attorney General has failed to follow the law," citing the missing redaction log, the failure to begin producing foreign-language records and the withheld notes concerning Trump.

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 department also told the court it cannot locate an unredacted version of the draft indictment, and asked for a two-month delay, saying it has not knowingly violated the act. Its 2 July filing had already sought a 60-day stay to let the Solicitor General decide whether to appeal, or failing that a seven-day stay, and argued that the case does not belong under the Administrative Procedure Act because FOIA offers an adequate remedy.

Sullivan invoked his handling of the 2008 prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens, in which he held three senior prosecutors in contempt after the government failed to disclose more than 30 exculpatory documents, and read the case citation into the record so the department's lawyers could look up what happened to them.

Emily Gilman of the Public Integrity Project, counsel for Phang, was directed to propose an order covering the FBI notes and the redaction justifications. Sullivan set a sealed review of the notes, which Blanche's office had already delivered to the court once before: 10 documents of unredacted files were hand-delivered to the courthouse at 2.28pm on 30 July, minutes inside a deadline Sullivan had set five days earlier after refusing two departmental attempts to delay.

The Federal Register manoeuvre

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward signed a report on 21 August that the department published in the Federal Register on 27 August, describing all categories of records released and withheld, a summary of redactions with their legal basis and a list of government officials and politically exposed persons named in the reviewed material.

Department lawyers filed that night to tell Sullivan the publication had discharged the obligation.

"Therefore, no declaration, or any further action, is needed," the filing said, four days after the 10-day deadline for that declaration had passed.

Section 3 of the act requires a one-off summary report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees within 15 days of release. Section 2 requires a written justification for every individual redaction, published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress. The document lodged on 27 August carries the heading of a Section 3 report to Congress and bears the date 14 February, six months before it appeared.

Phang wrote that the department had cited the wrong provision: "All, not some, not a summary of, not the ones that Blanche feels like picking, all redactions must be accompanied by a written justification published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress." Her reply is due on 3 September.

The statute and the record

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 the same day, requiring publication of the department's Epstein holdings subject to narrow exceptions for victim identity, child sexual abuse material, active investigations, images of death or injury and national defence.

The department published more than 3 million pages on 30 January, taking the total to nearly 3.5 million, with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton certified compliance with the victim-protection provisions, and the department said that "notable individuals and politicians were not redacted in the release of any files". Roughly 200,000 pages were redacted on deliberative process, work product and attorney-client grounds, none of which appear among the act's listed exceptions.

House Oversight Democrats put the department's total holdings at about 6 million documents, which would leave close to half unreleased seven months after the statutory deadline.

Sullivan's June injunction ordered the unredaction of material the department had certified as compliant, and his finding of concession removes from the appeal the question of whether the act was breached, leaving the D.C. Circuit only the question of how far the exceptions stretch. The department disputes that the concession was ever made, saying the finding came from a local rule treating unaddressed arguments as conceded.

Every month the redactions hold keeps the underlying records out of the hands of civil plaintiffs, congressional investigators and foreign prosecutors, and the department has sought a two-month extension in the district court on top of the appeal.

Contempt of court under 18 U.S.C. 401 reaches government lawyers personally, as the Stevens case showed, and Sullivan has now put the department on written notice. A finding would fall on named attorneys rather than on the department as an institution. Sullivan's decision to recite the Stevens citation aloud rather than issue a citation on the spot builds the record an appellate court would review if he acts later.

Phang's suit has produced every compliance ruling under the act so far, which leaves enforcement dependent on individual litigants and on judges willing to police it. The department's jurisdictional argument, that FOIA rather than the Administrative Procedure Act is the proper route, would if accepted push any future challenger into a slower process with its own exemptions.

The House Oversight Committee holds a parallel route through its subpoena power, and served Bondi in August 2025 with a demand for the complete unredacted files including material relevant to ongoing investigations. Democrats on the committee said in February that the department was still illegally withholding. Bondi was fired by Trump on 2 April.

Records withheld from publication remain subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and the grounds the department has taken in this litigation, that the redacted names belong to co-conspirators, will be difficult to reconcile with a privacy exemption claim in a later FOIA case.

Judge Jed Rakoff's approval of Bank of America's $72.5 million settlement with about 60 Epstein accusers on 27 August rested on financial records that survivors obtained through civil discovery rather than through the department's disclosure, among them suspicious activity reports the bank filed on more than $170 million in transactions between Leon Black and Epstein. Every substantial recovery in the Epstein matter to date, $290 million from JPMorgan Chase and $75 million from Deutsche Bank in 2023 and now $72.5 million from Bank of America, has come from private litigation against banks, and none of the three admitted wrongdoing.