U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 4, 2026.
The FBI wants to keep its revealing training videos hidden until after the 2026 election, but legal analyst Allison Gill continues to fight to get the details.
The FBI had a series of nine training videos that show agents how to redact the investigation files around trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Gill submitted a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request for the videos and the PowerPoint decks that embedded them.
In August, the Justice Department asked the court to delay its response to Gill's lawsuit by another 90 days. She said it was an effort to push it past the midterm elections. It has already been a year since the initial lawsuit was filed. Gill noted it's remarkably similar to Katie Phang's lawsuit that would have pushed her FOIA request until after the election as well.
"The judge said no, and set a due date for September 25th," she wrote on Sunday night. "DOJ asked for an additional week due to a vacation and it was granted."
Then late on Friday, they filed another last-minute brief with a sworn declaration by a woman who managed the FBI's redaction efforts with over 1,000 agents tasked to review the files they'd taken from the Southern District of New York when they'd closed down the ongoing investigation into possible coconspirators that began under President Joe Biden's administration. The then-new President, Donald Trump, fired the prosecutors involved, Gill noted, outlining the timeline.
"I can see why they wanted to hold this until after the midterms," Gill wrote on Substack. "In it, they outline that there are NINE training videos, that TWO of them instruct agents on how to flag files for supervisory review (ones that contain certain names including Trump), and that they relied on a search from over a year ago conducted in someone else’s case to satisfy my FOIA request."
In March 2025, the FBI paid millions in overtime after bringing in more than 1,000 agents to sift through the files and redact them. The redactions at the time were very different than what Congress ordered be redacted after it passed the law mandating that the files be released with only the victims' names redacted.
The ordeal began after Gill noticed that Bloomberg reporter Jason Leopold scored a cache of emails in a different FOIA request that included a PowerPoint attachment. Gill had sources saying that there were training videos embedded in the PowerPoint decks, so it sparked the FOIA request into motion in December 2025. Gill wanted the decks and the videos.
A source told her last summer that one of the videos demanded that Trump's name be hidden.
According to the FBI, they did have the videos, totaling about 75 minutes. She recalled that they didn't want to release the videos in their entirety in July.
"They also said they rejected our email from 6 months prior because they felt we were inappropriately trying to expand the scope of our FOIA," wrote Gill.
The FBI's brief is available here, and the FBI declaration is available here.
"I can see now why they wanted to push it back until after the midterm elections," Gill said in a video explaining the situation.
In two videos, agents were instructed to flag documents containing specific names.
"And that they're withholding them from us in their entirety to protect the identities of the FBI and Department of Justice personnel who appear in the videos," said Gill.
In the sworn declaration, the FBI agent created a table listing the nine training videos and their descriptions. In video four they show how to redact names of people who claimed to be victims. But the FBI allowed anyone to indicate they were a victim. That's how three people who were going to be charged as co-conspirators were hidden in the files, Gill explained. They self-identified as victims.
Videos four and five instruct agents how to flag a document for a supervisor. That's the key piece that dates back to the agents who leaked to Gill last March, who said they were told to flag mentions of Donald Trump by document and page number and log them in an Excel spreadsheet at the end of their shifts. A whistleblower report to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) confirmed that. Those videos in particular give guidelines for how to flag documents with certain people, including Trump.
"Notice they are admitting these are investigative files," Gill pointed out. "There was an investigation going on that was shut down. Also notice in the middle column, all of these videos include B61 and B7C1 exemptions."
Those are the exemptions they're using to hide pieces of the video. They claim the exemptions are because the video shows DOJ and FBI employees whose identities could be exposed to the public. They consider voices and faces personally identifying information for those employees.