Blanche on Not Properly Redacting Victim’s Names in the Epstein Files: Mistakes Were Made, and I Take Responsibility

EXCERPT:

BLANCHE: “When President Trump signed the Epstein Transparency Act, the Department of Justice undertook a Herculean task to review millions and millions of potentially responsive files. We were required under the statute to do this expeditiously and very quickly. The Department of Justice did so. We reviewed over 6 million pages. Many of these pages were not responsive. And what I mean by that is we intentionally over-collected potentially responsive documents. So for example, there was a case going on in Florida at the same time as the Jeffrey Epstein case involving another defendant named Epstein, having nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. When we collected materials, we collected everything involving Epstein, including the Epstein that had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. So the review of materials included non-responsive materials. The reviewers were qualified, experienced attorneys within the department and the FBI. They took pains to apply appropriate redactions. There were mistakes that were made, and so approximately 1 percent of the redactions had to be fixed after we released the Epstein files. Chairman, we had dozens of lawyers on call 24/7. Whenever we learned that any victim's name had been improperly not redacted, we immediately took the document down and fixed it as soon as we could. That doesn't excuse the mistakes of which I take responsibility, but it does mean that we tried to fix them.”