The Justice Department met US District Judge Emmet Sullivan’s Thursday deadline, hand-delivering unredacted copies of disputed Epstein-related records to his chambers at 2:28 p.m., about half an hour before the 3 p.m. cutoff he’d set five days earlier.
The production covers the eight email chains at the center of Katie Phang’s lawsuit, plus two additional documents DOJ redacted on victim and law enforcement grounds. DOJ submitted documentation alongside each one, meant to back up its claims about who those redactions protect.
DOJ gets specific about two files. File nine’s redacted sender and recipient information protects law enforcement identities, it says, and file ten hides an Assistant US Attorney’s name. Most of the other documents don’t get that treatment. MS NOW senior legal reporter Lisa Rubin found DOJ just labels them personally identifiable information, without claiming they protect any victim or law enforcement contact. That’s a vaguer basis than Sullivan’s order asked for.
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Read: Judge Orders DOJ to Prove Its Epstein Files Redactions Are Legitimate
In the same hour DOJ filed its compliance notice, a woman who survived Epstein moved to intervene in the case as Jane Doe, asking Sullivan to keep just her name redacted from two emails in the file that are already public.
None of the underlying material is public or will be made public in this state. The records are under in camera review, meaning Sullivan alone will examine them in chambers; he’d already denied Phang’s request to be present. Whether Sullivan agrees the blacked-out names belong to who DOJ says they do is still entirely up to him.
The department has conceded at least one mistake. According to reporting from MeidasTouch, the outlet Phang herself hosts for, DOJ acknowledged it had wrongly redacted Epstein’s own email address in one of the documents, an error unrelated to the victim-protection claims driving the case.
However, DOJ hasn’t backed off its broader position, saying it will appeal Sullivan’s underlying order regardless of what happens with this production. Thursday’s compliance settles the immediate deadline, not the larger fight over whether the redactions were lawful.
