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.Credit: @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.
Blanche 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.”
The Washington Post reported that congressmen Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, who led the charge to release the Epstein files, said they would seek to find Bondi in contempt of Congress for not releasing more documents.
“The quickest way, and I think most expeditious way, to get justice for these victims is to bring inherent contempt against Pam Bondi,” Massie said on CBS’s Face the Nation in an appearance with Khanna. “Ro Khanna and I are talking about and drafting that right now.”
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).