Exclusive: Justice Department scrambling to find holiday volunteers to redact the Epstein files, internal DOJ email says

By Katelyn Polantz, CNN

(CNN) — The Justice Department’s leadership asked career prosecutors in Florida to volunteer over the “next several days” to help redact the Epstein files, in the latest Trump administration push toward releasing the hundreds of thousands of photos, internal memos and other evidence around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

A supervising prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida’s US Attorney’s Office emailed the entire district office on Tuesday — two days before Christmas — announcing an “emergency request from the [Deputy Attorney General’s] office the SDFL must assist with,” according to a copy of the email reviewed by CNN. “We need AUSAs to do remote document review and redactions related to the Epstein files,” the email said.

The email raises the possibility of more Epstein files being released over the coming days, including the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. It also underlines the public and political backlash the Justice Department has faced since the deadline passed on Friday to release all documents in the federal government’s possession, as mandated by an act of Congress calling for transparency around Epstein files. The Justice Department acknowledged it had not gotten through redacting many of the files by Friday and has continued to release documents this week.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions from CNN about the email on Tuesday.

The Christmas-week request, from a top career prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office, attempts to entice volunteer attorneys to work on the files now, in exchange for days off later. It’s also possible that the call for volunteers frustrates busy career Justice Department employees after a year of departures and firings across the ranks by Trump administration leadership, as well as several in-court incidents that have hurt the department’s reputation in the legal community.

“I am aware that the timing could not be worse,” the US Attorney’s Office leadership wrote on Tuesday. “For some the holidays are about to begin, but I know that for others the holidays are coming to an end.”

The Justice Department was using hundreds of lawyers at its headquarters, especially national security specialists, to process the files over the past month, picking up a project the FBI and other agencies had worked on in slivers previously. The Tuesday request appears to seek to add lawyers to the project, more than a month after Congress passed the transparency act and President Donald Trump signed it into law.

The redaction guidelines provided by the department have been described by some sources familiar with them as being as being confusing or overly cautious on what is being redacted.

And the department also failed to meet the deadline, only releasing on Friday a portion of the files — many of which had already been in the public domain. Overnight, the Department released nearly 30,000 more records that contained many more new documents such as a prosecutor email noting Trump’s name on flight logs found in the criminal investigation of Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, and the paperwork documenting investigative subpoenas and interviews in 2019 through 2021, when Maxwell was convicted for sex trafficking minors.

Trump has never been accused by law enforcement of wrongdoing related to Epstein’s crimes, and he has denied any wrongdoing.

“We have an obligation to the public to release these documents and before we can do so, certain redactions must be made to protect the identity of the victims, among other things,” the Southern District of Florida leadership wrote in the email asking for volunteers on the Epstein redactions on Tuesday.

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