President Donald Trump and his lawyer Todd Blanche (Photo: Mark Peterson/Pool via REUTERS/File)
Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) on Tuesday called out Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on X as the Justice Department continues to violate the law mandating the release of all of the files around the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, with only victims redacted.
Massie, one of the many sorting through the released documents, posted an email from the files.
"A Sultan seems to have sent this. DOJ should make this public," he said, showing a screen capture of the email.
On X, Blanche replied, "You looked at the document. You know it’s an email address that was redacted. The law requires redactions for personally identifiable information, including if in an email address. And you know that the Sultan’s name is available unredacted in the files. See EFTA00666117."
Massie went off, exposing the Justice Department in a thread.
"In response to my posts on X today, DOJ 1) unredacted an FBI file that LABELS two individuals as co-conspirators 2) unredacted a file that lists several men who might be implicated 3) tacitly admitted that Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem was the sender of the torture video. This is significant because Kash Patel testified to Congress that FBI had no evidence of other sex traffickers," he wrote.
Massie said that Blanche appears to be acting as if redacting the name of the men is justified "because the document contains victims names. Tonight they learned you can redact victim names while still publishing the other names, per our law."
"Until tonight, no one knew who sent the torture video to Epstein. I went to DOJ, unredacted the email, and reverse searched the email to discover it was a Sultans. Our law requires VICTIM’s information to be redacted, not information of men who sent Epstein torture p——!" Massie closed.
Writing about the thread on BlueSky, Just Security co-editor-in-chief Ryan Goodman said that Blanche's comments "gives away the game here."
He gave props to Massie for calling out Blanche, noting that the law doesn't allow for redactions of the men involved. Goodman also noted that he predicted the DOJ would try to pull something like this.
"Could see some of this coming back in December when Blanche cited the Privacy Act as a basis for redactions/withholding documents," he said, pointing to a post he made a month ago about Attorney General Pam Bondi using the Privacy Act to help hide information of those implicated in the Epstein files.
"Here's Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's letter to Congress discussing the process of redactions and withholding of information (potentially two different things) with Epstein files," Goodman said, posting the document.
Blanche told "Meet the Press" on Dec. 21, "There is nothing that [Trump] has to hide in the Epstein files. There never was. And even though there's repeated attempts by Democrats to paint him as being part of the Epstein saga, it's failing over and over again. And so you should not be surprised that the material that we released on Friday or the material that we're going to release over the next couple of weeks is exactly what the statute requires us to release, which is everything that we have from this case, with the exception of redacting personal information from victims and other statutes, you know, privileges and things like that. Otherwise, everything is getting produced."
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said that President Donald Trump is mentioned 38,000 times in the Epstein files.
Goodman said it's clear that Blanche didn't mean to protect the victims' privacy. "He meant [to protect] men doing things like sharing a torture video with Epstein."
