“I went over there, and I was able to determine, at least I believe, that there were tons of completely unnecessary redactions, in addition to the failure to redact the names of victims, and so that was troubling to us,” Raskin told reporters.
He accused the justice department of being “in a cover-up mode” and breaking the law.
“They violated that precept by releasing the names of a lot of victims, which is either spectacular incompetence and sloppiness on their part, or, as a lot of the survivors believe, a deliberate threat to other survivors who are thinking about coming forward, that they need to be careful because they can be exposed and have their personal information dragged through the mud as well,” Raskin said.
The justice department has released a total of about 3.5m files related to Epstein, and Raskin said there were around 3m more awaiting release.
Another redacted document Raskin said he saw in full was an email Epstein had sent to his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, which contained an account from his lawyers of a conversation with attorneys representing Trump that occurred around 2009.
Trump was quoted in it as saying that while Epstein was never a member of his Mar-a-Lago club, he had been a guest and was never asked to leave, which would contradict statements from the president that he had at one point barred him from his Florida property.
They're allowed to take notes. I don't know what they can do with them. They can theoretically write down the doc # with evidence and bring it to a judge for release and to be used in court, but the courts have already decided they ALL have to be released and the DOJ is just refusing to comply.
And anyone who doesn't believe them just calls them a liar, and they have no way to prove it. So yeah, basically nothing.
My only theory is that maybe the DOJ legitimately foolishly thought that reviewing these documents would maybe convince them they needed to be redacted or something.