WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Monday that it had taken down several thousand documents and "media" that may have inadvertently included victim-identifying information since it began releasing the latest batch of documents related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein on Friday.
It blamed the release of sensitive information that drew an outcry from victims and their lawyers on mistakes that were “technical or human error.”
In a letter to the New York judges overseeing the sex trafficking cases brought against Epstein and confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton wrote that the department had taken down nearly all materials identified by victims or their lawyers, along with a "substantial number" of documents identified independently by the government.
Clayton, who is based in Manhattan, said the department has “iteratively revised its protocols for addressing flagging documents” after victims and their lawyers requested changes to the process for review and redaction of posted records.
He wrote that documents are promptly pulled down from the public website when victims flag a concern that something should be redacted. He said the concern is then evaluated before a redacted version of the document can be reposted, “ideally within 24 to 36 hours.”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in an interview Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that there have been sporadic errors but that the Justice Department has tried to work quickly to address them.
“Every time we hear from a victim or their lawyer that they believe that their name was not properly redacted, we immediately rectified that. And the numbers we’re talking about, just so the American people understand, we’re talking about .001 percent of all the materials,” Blanche said.
The effect of errors in the document redactions was highlighted Monday morning at a sex trafficking trial in New York federal court when lawyers for two high-end real estate brokers and their brother asked Judge Valerie E. Caproni for a mistrial because of documents that were made public without necessary redactions.
Deanna Paul, a defense lawyer at the trial of Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander, said the “government through its own conduct has destroyed the possibility of a fair trial in this case” after the names of the brothers were included in several documents released on Friday. The brothers have pleaded not guilty to drugging and raping multiple girls and women from 2008 to 2021.
Paul said the Alexander brothers had now been “branded” with the “most toxic association.”
The judge tentatively rejected the mistrial request but still confronted a prosecutor, asking: “Government, really?”
“Yes, I understand where the court's coming from,” replied Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Espinosa.
She said she wasn't sure how the documents were “caught up in the universe of documents” related to Epstein but confirmed that at least one of the documents that mention the Alexander brothers “should have been properly redacted” and she said the documents had been withdrawn from public circulation.
As she spoke, Espinosa also gave an update on the general release of Epstein-related documents by the Justice Department, saying that the remaining documents to be released were “primarily related to civil litigation” that might require a judge's approval to be made public.
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