The Justice Department continues to be struggling to course of the large trove of Epstein files and is prodding lots of of lawyers reviewing pages to work quicker, in accordance to a latest e mail from DOJ management and court docket filings over the previous few days.
“It is a grind,” the pinnacle of the Justice Department’s legal division Tysen Duva wrote on Friday to the doc evaluate staff who reviews to him. “While we certainly encourage aggressive overachievers, we need reviewers to hit the 1,000-page mark each day.”
The e mail is the newest indication of how burdensome the duty has turn into for the Justice Department to make the Epstein files public in compliance with a transparency legislation, with redactions. It was first reported by Bloomberg News.
“No one is suggesting this is how we wanted to start the year in terms of our focus,” Duva wrote. “But, this is the task at hand. We must complete it. The sooner that we do, the sooner this is over.”
The Justice Department has added lawyers in Washington, New York and Florida to the evaluate effort.
As of final week, lawyers in Duva’s division had reviewed round 209,000 pages of the files, he mentioned. Duva famous some of the legal division’s lawyers had reviewed “close to none,” encouraging every lawyer to course of no less than 1,000 a day.
One particular person had reviewed greater than 13,000 pages, Duva mentioned.
Also on Tuesday, US House members Ro Khanna, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, complained to a federal judge about their “urgent and grave concerns about DOJ’s failure to comply with the act.”
The choose, Paul Engelmayer in New York, oversees the safety of victims of Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, and hasn’t determined but on a request from the congressmen to herald an impartial third-party to test the Justice Department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. DOJ is about to reply in court docket by Friday.
Khanna and Massie have raised further considerations that the Trump administration might improperly redact many of the files, both by releasing info they shouldn’t have, or blacking out an excessive amount of.
Because the division hasn’t accomplished processing the files or given particular descriptions to Congress concerning the redactions and withholdings it’s making, it’s not recognized in the end what will probably be included within the ultimate Epstein files cache the division is publishing on-line.
The Justice Department final week mentioned in court docket it had reviewed about 12,000 paperwork out of greater than 2 million.
DOJ didn’t reply to a request for remark.
NCS’s Aleena Fayaz contributed to this report.