DOJ Releases Some Epstein Files

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0:58John Flannery:Welcome to The Beat. We have a special show for you, special guests, live from Congress, a lot to deal with what we were just discussing, what does transparency actually look like. The Trump DOJ is doing something, but also not meeting the deadline. They have not released everything from the Epstein files, but we do have new material. And so what we're going to do here, and Nicole Walls just walked us through why there's so much bipartisan pressure on this administration to comply. why we're going to walk through what we're learning as we go together, because I got all the materials here. We got a whole team inside MSNOW doing this work, going through the batches of documents fresh from just a few hours.

1:36John Flannery:We've been combing through it. We know Trump officials already admit that they are essentially not complying with the law. They are not releasing all the files. And the way they walked this out today was by first almost trying to lower expectations. The deputy attorney general blatantly saying they were not going to comply fully with the law, which fed some negative headlines. Then they released a bunch of stuff. And as I was mentioning to Nicole, we've got the four categories here I'm going to walk through. We have some new grand jury materials. We have some new photos. So it is important, even amidst the skepticism that is well earned for this government, to deal in the facts of what we have.

2:14John Flannery:And that's what we're going to do tonight. Now, there are many redactions, which raises a question. And this is a file that was over 90 pages that we pulled, and they've redacted everything, as you see. That's going to feed more questions about the compliance with Democrats warning tonight, and we'll hear from one shortly, that they will use all tools available to get this law 100 % complied with. We are also parsing through the various different materials we've gotten. That includes court documents from cases where we didn't have all the information. That goes all the way back to 2008. There are hundreds of photos, some videos, some audio tapes, messages around voicemails that continue to add to the information about this sprawling web.

2:57John Flannery:So if you are someone saying tonight, did we get nothing? The answer is no. We, the American public, journalists, lawyers, those interested in this story got new information. And if you're asking, did we get everything? No. As Nicole and I discussed, we're a long way from that. The DOJ is not being transparent. And so I'm going to show you what I mentioned. How they started the day was not, hey, we're really trying or the way they worded it in this letter, which I'll get into, which on paper sounds good, like, hey, we're doing as much as we can. But they did something quite different to start the day.

3:29John Flannery:The very controversial former defense lawyer for Donald Trump, now the number two official DOJ, went out on Fox and said they're not releasing all the files today. I expect that we're going to release several hundred thousand documents today, and those documents will come in all different forms, photographs and other materials. And so I expect that we're going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks. So today, several hundred thousand. And then over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more. The law says what it says. President Trump signed it. And of all the agencies in government, the Justice Department knows a lot about complying with the law.

4:13John Flannery:Remember, Mr. Blanche, Pam Bondi and their deputies and prosecutors, they go after people all the time for not complying with the law. If you have an IRS deadline, you don't get to say, I'm giving you some now and some later, maybe a couple hundred thousand later. This goes to the question of whether this Trump administration is honest, complies with the law, or is dishonest and has a different elite standard for itself than everyone else. Here's how Blanche put it to Congress. Because of the volume of the material and the requirements at every page of every doc be reviewed for potential redactions, final stages of review of some material continue.

4:49John Flannery:They talked about that ongoing review being completed over the next two weeks. And that's what I mean about the contrast. As a letter, the reason that's written that way and that carefully, and we have it right here, is they are prepared to be taken to court, and they want to be able to try to argue to judges that they are really doing this. So in writing and to Congress and in the legal documents, this DOJ is acting like the Epstein Transparency Act is good law. They're not defying it. And they are, I think, I'm telling you our reporting, trying to set themselves up to be able to defend this if they are taken to court.

5:23John Flannery:At the same time on Fox and elsewhere, they have a little more bluster sounding like they'll decide when and how material comes out. And I mentioned Congressman Ro Khanna, who led this fight on a bipartisan basis, a Democrat who recruited Republicans and then won that clash with the president himself. Here's how he's reacting. Some of the documents I've just been scanning them have very heavy redactions. This including documents which judges ordered released, like the grand jury testimony in New York. They owe the Congress and the American public an explanation for every redaction. That I didn't see published on the DOJ page.

6:04But the law is very clear that any redaction has to be justified in writing.

6:12John Flannery:Fact check, true. Now, in all fairness to the government, the way the law was written, it expedited first the documents. It said, release everything by tonight. And then it gives them two more weeks to explain the redactions. So the congressman is correct, although technically, under the law, they can, the DOJ, take two more weeks to explain these redactions. And as I told you, some of them require explanations. As for the reference to grand jury material, that's important because that is usually secret. If you remember, say, the Bob Mueller grand jury notes, we never got them. even though they were of public interest.

6:46John Flannery:Here, the law requires them, and DOJ says, and I'm just sharing with you our notes as we go, that they are releasing the grand jury materials. I'll just make one more point on this. I'm reading from the letter here, and it says, they will release the materials from Epstein's criminal case in 18, the Maxwell case in 19, the Epstein death probe, and the grand jury materials from the Southern District of New York. So tonight and the days ahead, we are going to be combing through all of this. You can't instantly do hundreds of thousands of documents, and the DOJ hasn't made it easily searchable. I'll get to that in a moment.

7:21John Flannery:So one big question here is, are they complying with those judicial orders to release all the secret grand jury material? And if so, that will yield a lot of important information. And if not, well, there's court cases there and judges there to make them do it. Now, I'm going to put back up the statement we started showing you. Chuck Schumer says releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency. Dems will address and assess how the documents have been, quote, released to determine what actions must be taken. So that is the state of play. The Democrats are not playing dead.

7:51John Flannery:They're not acting like, oh, thank you so much for a couple redacted pages. But there is a process aspect to this. Anyone trying to tell you tonight what's in all these documents? Well, you can't believe them because no one, not even an artificial intelligence, can scan all of this instantly. We're going to be going through this with you tonight, so get comfortable, buckle up. I've got great guests. I'm starting with John Flannery, a former federal prosecutor who's been a special counsel to congressional committees. John, welcome. Before we get into all of it, my first question for you tonight, based on what we know, which is fluid, how would you grade the compliance?

8:28John Flannery:It's clearly not an F in that they haven't blown off the entire project. And as I showed viewers, it doesn't look like an A. But how do you view the compliance based on what we know? Well, let's start with the simply. They have already defined the order that said that this would happen no later than today. I'm waiting till midnight. Maybe there's more, but I would give them an F because it strikes me that that doesn't occur unless you are having a document dump to withhold, as litigators sometimes do, to withhold the information that is called for by the statute. that set this whole thing in motion.

9:09The second thing, and you've referred to it already, and so I want to underscore it, that the documents be searchable. My undergraduate degrees are physics and engineering, and I have a master's in information science, and I just sort of watch this stuff pass me by because I don't think I could code anything by any language they use today. But one thing I do know, and that is if you take a picture of a document, they call it a TIFF, T-I-F-F, then you can't read that document. And there's jokes about occasional character recognition, which is that you can change that picture into words and letters, and then you can search them.

9:49And when you can search them, then you can do Boolean searches, for example, Trump and Epstein. I want all those references. Now, they have, and the DOJ dump produced a page that says, type in what you want to search and we will give it to you. So I did what some people would do on their home computers, a control F. I took their little form and I typed in T-R-U-M-P and I hit the button and said, your search reveals nothing.

10:20John Flannery:So I thought, well, how about F-E-N? I'm going to slow you down to keep everyone with us. You're talking about something that is legally required. Correct. I just want to remind viewers, the Congress didn't say, hey, send this over to us. We'll review it first. Sometimes they do that. They didn't say, have the inspector general review it and give us a summary. Because of the secrecy and the failure by parties, both parties, administrations over the history as we know it of justice, the victims, the elites. This was a different approach. It was put all the information in a searchable, downloadable format so the public can deal with an area where there's been so much skepticism and scrutiny.

11:02John Flannery:And so the search bar, as we've checked, it has some functionality. The New York Times reported that when it was first released, it wasn't working. 5.30 p.m., I want to show people, to your point, you put in Trump, who we know has been in there many times, and it had two hits total. A search for Maxwell, it should generate many hundreds of hits. There's a whole case file for her. Wasn't working well. It showed only 31. And to give viewers, I'm showing this so people can see with their own eyes. The most egregious example is if you search Epstein, you get about 224 hits out of a production that the deputy attorney general described as hundreds of thousands.

11:44John Flannery:And I could tell viewers that would be like getting 1 % accuracy. So, John, the fact that they had the month to prepare and as of the release, it's not working tells you what? It tells me it's hard for me to believe it's an accident, given the context in which anything is produced. We have the former counsel, criminal defense counsel to Mr. Trump, and he is directing this. And he is the one who is already violating, as he's telling us, this is what you're going to get. You get some now and you'll get some later. And it's supposed to be searchable. And those words are exactly, it says searchable and downloadable format.

12:26And the other thing you'll notice is they put everything in stovepipes. So you have a collection. I went through them as little, as best I could in the time allowed. They have like a series of pictures and then they'll have a document in there that is an FBI document. And there's no way to find that because of what I've just been describing. Also, you suggest rightly that how could there be so few references to Trump? And the answer to that is I don't believe it's true. And so how do we check that? Well, number one, Trump is not under investigation. Number two, you cannot withhold information, and I'm holding the statute up so I get it absolutely correct, that no record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, political sensitivity, including to any government official public figure of foreign dignitary.

13:26Trump has no defense against any of this, nor, I suggest, does Epstein nor Maxwell. And I use those individual words. And when you posted, as you did rightly, a word search, you'll notice that they gave two trenches for that search. This is my way of saying, when did we forget who was supplying this information to us? and with what contempt, not talking about court right now, what contempt they view any request for this information. And one of the questions is, why is Trump doing these other things? I think to misdirect us like a poorly paid magician so that we don't pay as much attention to this.

14:11And this also admits his - Stay with, your points are fair.

14:14John Flannery:I'm bringing in another lawyer, as sometimes less lawyers do. We gotta watch the time, although I appreciate you. Nancy Erica Smith is also here to announce civil rights attorney who's represented victims of sexual assault and harassment. John stays with us. Nancy, there's so much to peel through here. I want to read a little more from the letter where, and this actually builds on the point that John made. The letter goes out of its way to say that they had, quote, 200 DOJ attorneys working on this. That's not just, you know, researchers and paralegals who also, as all lawyers know, do important work, But that's DOJ level credentialed attorneys, 200 of them.

14:54John Flannery:And it raises the question, Nancy, how many attorneys would it take to comply with this law fully and honestly, rather than, as John and others have said, the way it seems to be going? Well, Harry, I had a case not long ago where the defendant served five million documents on us, as Mr. Flannery calls a document dump. And it's designed to make it difficult to find things. But it was served properly so I could send it to my data company and it was searchable. I could find any name in 5 million documents. I could search by date, by topic, by name. So this is possible. It's possible with 5 million documents.

15:39It's been done in my own experience. and this DOJ is just, I mean, but this isn't surprising. This should not be called the Department of Justice any longer. The Department of Justice pursues justice for Americans. That is not what this is anymore. Trump loves to name things. This should be the law firm of Trump because these people are not fair or honest or pursuing justice for the American people. Todd Blanche certainly is, and he's coddling Maxwell. a co-conspirator, a convicted sex trafficker for a pedophile. And Bondi, I'm going to release the files. And we've heard reports that they have been redacting these files for months before the law was passed.

16:27John Flannery:There's no shortage of efforts inside the DOJ here, which is why people are skeptical. I want to play something from a survivor, Danielle Penske, who was speaking to our colleague Anna today. Take a listen. I just read Todd Blanche's statement saying that we're going to see more in the coming weeks. And that makes me really nervous. And well, because we were really prepared. We had hoped that we would see everything today. So I do think that survivors definitely will be looking through everything and combing the files and trying to find what we know to be true. It re-traumatizes, but we know that it's important so that it doesn't happen again.

17:10John Flannery:That's a big part of this, having information transparency and prevention, even if you put for a moment the commander in chief aside. And I'm curious what you think of the categories we have, Nancy, for that substantive process. This is from the new website printout. And I've just noted they have court files, some of which are already obviously public. The DOJ files, that's most of the new stuff. FOIA, which is largely already public, and then interactions with Congress, also already public. And so it has a little bit of an Alice in Wonderland quality. And again, it's supposed to be for the public to access where there's about 18 doors here.

17:51John Flannery:And about, I'm guesstimating, but about 15 of them, you open them and you find a bunch of stuff that's already in public. There are, I want to be fair and clear, some doors that lead to new material. And we're going through all that. We'll get into some of that in the hour. This is the first few hours of it. There's pictures of Epstein and others. There's pictures we're not going to show that give more context to how women and possibly underage women, hard to tell from the photos, partially redacted, were basically put in these piles of photos. There's other disturbing material. We have a standards department that goes through this.

18:25John Flannery:So some of it's new, but about 15 doors lead to old documents. What do you think of the way they're presenting this and the effort of survivors for accountability? It's in contempt of the law. They should, I mean, I don't think this is going to happen because they keep going to the Supreme Court, which is basically Trump's court and corrupt. But the court, the lower courts have been holding this administration accountable. and those silos that they have put the information in do not comply with what the intent of the law is. The intent of the law is that Americans and the world can see what happened.

19:04How is it possible that for decades a pedophile sex trafficker was able to skirt the law? How is it possible that he got a sweetheart deal in Florida and then the lawyer who gave him that sweetheart deal was in the first Trump administration. And it also, on a broader, deeper level, it shows that women still don't matter because there are so many enablers here for so many decades. And women don't matter to begin with, but when rich and powerful men are involved, women don't matter at all, even young girls, even 14-year-olds. And that's tragic. Yeah.

19:47John Flannery:I want to play from another survivor as we think about that aspect of this, John. This is Marina Alacerda. Sure. Will the redactions bills will still be to protect the wealthy and the rich, powerful men? Or will it bring them to justice? On the emails that Jeffrey Epstein was going back and forth, he mentions Trump, Donald Trump, correct? So that's another powerful person. I don't think that we need to hear more from the survivors They are scared sometimes to mention other people, other, you know, powerful men that have been involved. John. Twice we have had the misogynist in chief playing a part, denying dignity and respect to women.

20:36And twice they've been denied equal justice before the law. This court overturned a 50-year law that protected women's right to take care of themselves and not to be affected by people like this backward individual who has no reason to be in the White House and shouldn't be tolerated. Why the Democrats are not already in court asking for contempt against these people and asking to have people assigned, a master of the court, because we already have a fixed game here. And how many times can these guys do us and we miss the fact that they're trying to do us? It's time we said to them, enough is enough.

21:17You guys may try to destroy America with a phony war to conceal from the public what you did, what you Trump did and all your supporters did against these women. And what man in the Republican Party can go home and say to his wife or daughter or sister or whatever, that he is supporting this effort against women generally and against the truth particularly in a nation that's the laughingstock of the world pretending to be a democracy and abusing women on a scale unprecedented in American history after slavery. There are several lawyers, supposedly, who refuse to participate in the redaction. Okay, I'm sorry.

22:01John Flannery:Yeah. Well, I'm not sorry for what I said. They'll be sorry. No, you're not sorry for what you said. I appreciate how forthright you are. That's what happens when John Flannery gets into it. Nancy and John, both experienced lawyers who care about this a lot on this big news night. I want to thank you both. I have a short break, 90 seconds, and we're back on What's in the Files with Gretchen Carlson. Say you've always wanted to have a backyard oasis. Here's the thing. If you get smart with your money, you can do things like that. With Empower, you can start making the most out of your money so you can go out and live a little.

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24:00Though I'd like to answer that question, at least today, I'm going to have to restrict my fifth, sixth, and fourth case of the amendment, right, sir?

24:11John Flannery:We now have new Epstein files tonight. The Justice Department has described in its letter to Congress a process, what it calls compliance, although it says also hundreds of thousands of documents could still come out, and discusses how 1 ,200 names have now been identified as either victims or victims' relatives of Epstein, And thus, all 1 ,200 such names have been redacted. I'm joined by Gretchen Carlson, the veteran journalist, co-founder of Lift Our Voices. Your view on what we're seeing tonight. Well, I think it's a total whiff to use Susie Wiles, the chief of staff's terminology, that she described how our Attorney General Pam Bondi was looking into this earlier this week in the Vanity Fair profile.