A federal judge said Attorney General Todd Blanche isn’t sufficiently following the court’s orders in a case concerning Jeffrey Epstein files and gave Blanche a deadline to comply or face the possibility of contempt charges.
The order stems from a lawsuit by Katie Phang, a lawyer and political commentator seeking to force the Justice Department to turn over more Epstein documents.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said Wednesday that “a civil contempt finding at this juncture would be premature,” but he left charges on the table if Blanche fails to meet a new Sept. 24 deadline to produce documents or explain to the court why its order to release the records is not “clear and unambiguous.”
“[Blanche] did not respond substantively to Plaintiff’s merits arguments, and in granting her motion, the court largely adopted her proposed order, which [Blanche] did not address in his opposition,” Sullivan wrote in his Wednesday opinion.
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At an August hearing, Sullivan warned government lawyers that contempt proceedings could ruin their careers, adding “the public has a right to know what the hell is going on.”
In June, the court ruled that Phang has the right to sue Blanche in federal court in D.C. and is harmed by Blanche’s refusal to release documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by Congress last year.
Phang spoke about the lawsuit with survivors of Epstein, who killed himself in prison while facing sex trafficking charges, in an interview published on her YouTube page Wednesday.
“That’s really the most horrific thing,” she said. “That the top cop and top lawyer in our country violated the law.”
In his Wednesday ruling, Sullivan ordered Blanche to produce unreleased FBI interview notes and foreign language materials that the department said it couldn’t release under the law because the task was “not practicable for a first-level reviewer.”
The court sided against that argument, stating the documents are required under the law passed by Congress.
Blanche also must prove that names initially redacted by the Justice Department indeed belong to victims of sex trafficking. The department has argued that producing the unredacted information would violate privacy laws, an argument the court rejected.
“There are redactions that my lawsuit obviously says are illegal redactions or illegal withholdings,” Phang said. “I can’t imagine that anybody would be satisfied that there’s still millions of documents that Todd Blanche says are duplicative or non-responsive, and he won’t even turn them over to the people.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to The Washington Sun’s request for comment.
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