The Justice Department released hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Friday that made scant reference to US President Donald Trump but extensively featured Democratic former president Bill Clinton.
The release was intended to comply with a law overwhelmingly passed by Congress in November that mandated the disclosure of all Epstein files, despite the Republican president’s months-long effort to keep them sealed.
Trump for years had promoted conspiracy theories about Epstein, but the case has turned into a political liability for him since his return to the White House in January.
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It was not immediately clear how substantive the new materials were, given that many Epstein-related documents have previously been made public since his 2019 death in jail, which was ruled a suicide. Reuters is in the process of reviewing them.
The material included evidence from several law enforcement investigations into Epstein, along with photos of Clinton, long scorned by Trump’s Republicans. But they appeared to include few if any photos of Trump or documents mentioning him, despite Trump and Epstein’s well-publicised friendship in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The absence of references to Trump was notable given that pictures and documents related to him have trickled out of previous Epstein releases for years.