The release on Tuesday of more than 11,000 additional documents in the Justice Department’s “Epstein files” is a continuation of the state-orchestrated coverup of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal enterprise and its wealthy and powerful participants, including President Donald Trump.

The chaotic dump of material into the public domain—riddled with redactions, unexplained anomalies and overt political spin—expresses the crisis of the American ruling class and its determination to shield its own from exposure and accountability.

According to media tallies, the latest batch consists of upwards of 11,000 separate files totaling nearly 30,000 pages, making it the largest single release to date under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The documents span court records, FBI and DOJ communications, emails, news clippings, spreadsheets, photos and “hundreds of video files,” together with materials related to Epstein’s 2019 death in federal custody.

The release was accompanied by an extraordinary but unsurprising political disclaimer from the DOJ posted on social media at 7:34 am:

Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.

The tranche comes on top of earlier data sets which included thousands of investigative photos of Epstein’s New York and Virgin Islands properties, travel images, call logs, police files, and grand jury presentations and interview transcripts. On a purely quantitative level, the state acknowledges that the overall archive will ultimately amount to “several hundred thousand” documents revealing that what is being presented to the public remains partial, selective and tightly managed.

The large volume and unstructured character of Tuesday’s release, without coherent explanation, indexing or contextual analysis, is clearly intended to overwhelm and confuse. Tens of thousands of pages are posted in bulk, packed with duplicative material, press clippings, procedural minutiae and, crucially, heavy redactions that render key documents unintelligible.

This method mirrors a broader pattern in the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files: dump data without clarity, substitute legalistic verbiage for substantive disclosure, and then weaponize the chaos by declaring that “nothing of significance” has been found. The combination of data overload and opacity functions as censorship, allowing Trump’s lackeys in the DOJ to claim formal “compliance” with the law while laying the basis for plausible deniability by the participants in the criminal network as well as its protectors.

For example, Trump responded to questions at an event at Mar‑a‑Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on Monday about the Epstein files release. Speaking about photos and documents that put well‑known figures in Epstein’s orbit, Trump complained that “highly respected bankers and lawyers and others” had their lives “ruined” because they were falsely associated with Epstein just by attending a party or ending up in a photograph with him.

Among the most widely discussed items in the new release is the document purporting to be a 2019 letter from Epstein, who was then jailed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, to disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar.

The letter, which was attributed to Epstein, glorifies his shared abuse of girls with Nassar. It opens by telling Nassar that they “shared one thing … our love & caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential,” then adds that “our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls,” followed by a vulgar line about him liking to “grab snatch” when “a young beauty walked by,” in contrast to Epstein and Nassar “snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.”

The letter is postmarked after Epstein’s officially reported death in August 2019 and bears a Virginia postmark and an inaccurate return address lacking his inmate number, even though Epstein was supposedly in New York at the time and federal mail rules require the identification.

Officials say the letter was returned to the prison mail room, and FBI records show that agents requested a handwriting analysis to determine authenticity, but the result of that analysis is absent from the public files. In a belated public statement at 3:30 pm on Tuesday, the Justice Department claims the FBI has since determined that the Nassar letter is a “fake,” while simultaneously choosing to include the images of the letter in Tuesday’s release and acknowledging that it processed through the system after Epstein’s death.

These facts raise more questions than they answer. Why was such an anomalous, posthumous document retained, circulated and analyzed for years, only to be declared “fake” just when it was made public? Who generated the letter, how did it enter the mail stream, and what does its presence in the MCC mail room weeks after Epstein’s death indicate about the handling—and potential manipulation—of evidence related to his detention and demise?

Despite the politically motivated spin from the DOJ, important new facts are emerging from the latest batch and are being discussed widely in the press and on social media. These include concrete references to at least ten “co‑conspirators” identified by federal investigators; evidence that Trump flew on Epstein’s jet far more frequently than previously admitted; and documentary traces of investigative activity around figures like Ghislaine Maxwell, Leslie Wexner, billionaire founder of L Brands and long‑time employer and financial sponsor of Epstein, and Jean‑Luc Brunel, French modeling agent closely linked to Epstein and accused by multiple women of supplying underage girls, that starkly contradict the claim that redactions are solely to “protect victims.” 

Significant new information includes:

• Emails from July 2019 among FBI and DOJ officials repeatedly refer to “10 co‑conspirators,” reflecting an internal list of individuals whom federal agents were actively trying to locate, subpoena and interview in the weeks surrounding Epstein’s federal indictment. Follow‑up exchanges show that at least six of these ten had been located and served with grand jury subpoenas, while four remained “outstanding,” including “a wealthy businessman in Ohio.” 
• A later internal email from May 2020 describes a seven‑page memo on “co‑conspirators we could potentially charge” drafted “the Monday after Epstein’s death,” and an 86‑page “co‑conspirator update memo” completed in December 2019, along with a “corporate prosecution memo” that was “never discussed.” A separate “DAG meeting” briefing from November 2020 states that prosecutors were in active plea negotiations with another “Epstein co‑conspirator” who had “scheduled hundreds of sexual massages with minors,” and might plead guilty to an obstruction‑related charge.
• Yet in the files released to the public, the names of seven of these ten co‑conspirators remain redacted, even where contextual clues make clear that they are high‑profile political and financial figures rather than vulnerable victims. This is in direct conflict with the DOJ’s assertion that redactions are limited to “survivors’ personal identifying information” and a narrow set of legally protected categories. 

The continued protection of these and other figures through redaction is about shielding the wealthy and powerful—from Wall Street billionaires to members of the aristocracy and political establishment—whose association with Epstein was not incidental but structurally embedded in his operation.

Representative Robert Garcia, leading Democrat from California, said on Tuesday, “Who are Epstein’s co‑conspirators? Why are they making illegal redactions?” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican from Kentucky, told the Miami Herald on Tuesday that “a complete disclosure consistent with the Epstein Files Transparency Act will reveal more men should be investigated for sex crimes.”

Another major revelation in the new tranche is a 2020 email from an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York stating that flight logs show Donald Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet “many more times” than either prosecutors or the public had previously known.

According to the email, Trump is listed as a passenger on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996, including at least four flights on which Ghislaine Maxwell was also present. The prosecutor further notes that Trump flew at least once with Epstein and a 20‑year‑old woman whose name is redacted, and twice with women who “would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case.”

The message concludes that the records had been carefully reviewed and that the official wanted to ensure none of this would be a “surprise down the road,” indicating that Trump’s travel on the jet was treated internally as a politically sensitive matter.

These facts directly contradict the narrative from Trump himself, who has sought to minimize his association with Epstein claiming that they had a “falling out” in the mid‑2000s. Trump said before the 2020 elections that if claims about his relationship with Epstein had “a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized” earlier.

Now, internal DOJ correspondence acknowledges concrete, previously undisclosed evidence of Trump’s repeated presence on Epstein’s plane, alongside Maxwell and potential witnesses, while the official messaging portrays the president as the innocent target of baseless smears.

Further undermining any claim of good faith, the Justice Department’s handling of Tuesday’s release has been marked by technical “errors,” hasty removals and republished files with altered redactions. Earlier batches posted online were taken down and re‑uploaded after journalists and independent researchers identified inconsistent redactions and files that clearly violated the statutory limitations by blacking out alleged perpetrators while leaving victims’ names exposed.

Investigative commentary has catalogued dozens of such violations, including entire pages of names being blacked out under the guise of “victim protection,” even though many of those names had previously been identified by the Trump team itself as perpetrators or employees in Epstein’s network.

In some cases, the administration has even been caught inserting unrelated, decades‑old public photographs into the “Epstein files,” with faces redacted in a way designed to imply the presence of underage victims and redirect public suspicion onto convenient political targets. 

This slipshod and manipulative approach is not merely a reflection of bureaucratic bungling. It is, above all, an expression of the profound crisis gripping the American ruling class. The White House has no intention of acknowledging the criminal character of Epstein’s activities or the complicity of the state apparatus—including the FBI, federal prosecutors and prison authorities—in enabling those crimes and then covering up their extent.

The DOJ’s own numbers now admit that more than 1,200 individuals have been identified as victims or relatives of victims, a staggering figure that speaks to the industrial scale of Epstein’s trafficking operation and the devastation it left behind. Yet six years after his death, not one of his major financial, political or intelligence patrons has been indicted, and the latest release confirms that carefully prepared co‑conspirator prosecution memos were simply filed away and “never discussed.”

In the Epstein saga, the behavior of the entire capitalist ruling establishment stands exposed as that of a socially degenerate layer presiding over a decaying socio-economic order. The files reveal a world in which billionaires, princes, presidents and media celebrities treated the sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls as an accepted perk of wealth and power, and in which the institutions nominally tasked with “law enforcement” functioned as their shield and accomplice.

The latest tranche shows Epstein’s network extending from royal estates like Balmoral—where a contact jokingly asked Maxwell to find “new inappropriate friends” for a royal identified as “Andrew”—to private jets, Caribbean islands and luxury clubs like Mar‑a‑Lago, all integrated into the normal social calendar of the financial and political elite.

The fact that Trump’s own resort was subpoenaed for employment records in the Maxwell case, and that an FBI tipster described being invited to a “Jeffrey Epstein party” at Mar‑a‑Lago “for prostitutes,” indicates how deeply the activities of billionaire degenerates overlap.

That both Democrats and Republicans now posture as champions of “transparency” while continuing to defend the institutions and property relations that created this cesspool only underscores their hypocrisy. For all the vituperation in Congress, no faction of the ruling class is prepared to identify the network of bankers, hedge‑fund managers, intelligence operatives and political fixers who enabled Epstein’s crimes because they are part of the same ruling oligarchy. 

From the moment of Epstein’s arrest in July 2019 and his sudden death in a Manhattan jail a month later, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the case was not an aberrant scandal but a window into the rot of American capitalism and its state.

The WSWS drew attention to the connection between extraordinary “coincidences” surrounding his death: the malfunctioning cameras, the falsified guard logs, and the singularity of Epstein being the only inmate at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in a decade to die by hanging, and the crisis of American democracy driven by ever-deepening social inequality and the rise of the fraudster and conman Donald Trump to the US presidency.

Epstein’s arrest and death occurred during the third year of the first Trump administration, a period marked by cascading political crises that would culminate in Trump’s 2020 election defeat and his subsequent attempt to overturn the result through the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol.

The same authoritarian, lawless tendencies that ultimately manifested in the effort to nullify an election were already present in the state’s handling of Epstein’s case: contempt for legality, manipulation of evidence and the use of the repressive apparatus to protect the interests of the ruling elite.

The new release of Epstein files, with all its calculated obfuscation, further confirms the central lesson of Epstein affair: No section of the capitalist state—no administration, no party, no law enforcement agency—can be relied upon to expose, much less punish, the crimes of the ruling class.

Only the independent political mobilization of the working class, armed with a socialist program, can bring the full truth to light and hold to account those who built, financed and protected Epstein’s predatory empire.