María Paula Mijares Torres
December 22, 2025 — 5:52am
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Washington: US Justice Department officials were protecting victims of Jeffrey Epstein when they removed several images at the weekend from the agency’s release of files tied to the notorious sex offender, Deputy Attorney-General Todd Blanche said.
“There were a number of photographs that were pulled down after being released on Friday,” Blanche said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That’s because a judge in New York has ordered us to listen to any victim or victim rights group if they have any concerns about the material that we’re putting up.”
A picture of Donald Trump in a drawer was released by the Justice Department on Friday before being removed from its website.Department of Justice
Attention has focused on an image of a desk drawer with a number of photos, including one showing future President Donald Trump, that was among those removed from the department’s website after a massive release of material on Friday (Saturday AEDT).
“You can see in that photo there’s photographs of women,” Blanche said. “And so we learned after releasing that photograph that there were concerns about those women and the fact that we had put that photo up. So we pulled that photo down. It has nothing to do with President Trump.”
The New York Times reported on Monday morning that the photo has since been re-uploaded to the online files, and that the Justice Department said it had reposted it after determining it did not contain images of any victims.
Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, has emerged as the Justice Department’s main public face in the release of the agency’s Epstein files, which was mandated by Congress after a bipartisan groundswell overcame Trump’s objections to publicising the material.
In a letter to Congress on Friday, Blanche said the department couldn’t meet the December 19 deadline for a full release because of the volume of material and restrictions imposed by a federal judge in Manhattan aimed at preventing the identification of victims.
Deputy Attorney-General Todd Blanche.AP
He said more than 1200 victims or relatives were identified during the review process and that references to them were redacted, along with information covered by legal privileges such as attorney-client and deliberative-process protections.
Blanche said on Monday (AEDT) that he and Attorney-General Pam Bondi had spoken to victims’ groups as recently as Thursday, though he didn’t provide specifics about the decision to pull the image showing Trump.
“If we need to redact faces or other information, we will,” Blanche told NBC. “And then we’ll put it back up.”
The partial release and extensive redactions prompted immediate criticism by some lawmakers. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee accused the administration of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act and shielding Trump.
Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and an unnamed woman in an image released previously.@OversightDems/X
Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said on CNN’s State of the Union that the administration is “covering up things that, for whatever reason, Donald Trump doesn’t want to go public.”
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Blanche rejected that allegation, pledging that nothing related to Trump in the files would be withheld.
“If President Trump is mentioned, if there’s photographs that we have of President Trump or anybody else, they, of course, will be released with the exception of any victims or survivors that we’ve identified,” he told NBC.
He also argued that the law allowed for leeway in the timeline to protect victims.
“Bring it on,” he said. “We are doing everything we’re supposed to be doing to comply with this statute.”
Before working in the Justice Department, Blanche represented Trump during his 2024 criminal trial in New York City where he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on May 30, 2024.
Bloomberg
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).
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