Judge Sullivan Denied Blanche a Partial Stay While Katie Phang Says the FBI Notes Never Hit the Public Docket

On September 21, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan refused to give Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche the partial stay Blanche wanted in journalist Katie Phang’s Epstein files lawsuit. Three days later, the public docket still did not show a notice that the most sensitive chamber delivery had arrived. Phang says a Justice Department lawyer emailed her side anyway, with a one-line claim of compliance. Those two facts can both be true, and neither one is the same as a judge confirming what he was handed.

The case is Phang v. Blanche, No. 1:26-cv-01417, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Phang, an attorney and independent journalist, sued on April 27, 2026. She argues that Blanche, in his official capacity, has not obeyed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the statute President Donald Trump signed on November 19, 2025. The act set a December 19, 2025 deadline for the bulk of the government’s Epstein records to be public, with narrow room for redaction. Phang’s suit is not a request for gossip. It is an Administrative Procedure Act case about whether the department followed the statute Congress passed.

What Sullivan already decided before September

On June 25, Sullivan granted a preliminary injunction. In the accompanying opinion he wrote that Blanche had not answered Phang’s arguments in substance, and that the Attorney General had therefore conceded a violation of the act. Politico’s account of the ruling said the department had effectively admitted it was out of compliance with the law Congress passed the previous November. The court denied a request to pause the order for an appeal. The July 2 deadline was real: produce specified material with fewer redactions, or show cause why the black bars should stay.

The categories were concrete. Sullivan wanted sender and recipient names restored, or justified, on email chains with Jeffrey Epstein that discussed a “torture video” and sexual activity involving young women, including minors. He wanted co-conspirator identities in a draft indictment and related records revisited. He wanted the department to start on foreign-language material that reviewers had said they could not assess. And he wanted the FBI interview record of a woman who has alleged that Epstein introduced her to Trump in the 1980s, when she was about 13, and that Trump assaulted her. The Hill reported that the FBI interviewed her more than once and that page-count gaps remained even after later releases. None of that is a finding that the allegation is true. It is a finding that the statute, as Sullivan reads it, does not let the department hide the interview behind a shrug.

July and August did not end the fight. A July 25 order pushed documents into chambers. On August 6, Sullivan set a public hearing for August 13 because the department still had not documented its claim that certain redacted names were victims. Coverage of that hearing quotes the judge telling the courtroom the public had a right to know what was going on, and raising contempt as a live possibility.

The September 16 order, and the stay he would not grant

On September 16, Sullivan filed a memorandum opinion and order, ECF No. 43, answering the pile of responses to the June injunction. He discharged the show-cause demands on some specific redactions, including several of the email and co-conspirator documents. He did not close the case. He ordered Blanche to deliver, by 11 a.m. on September 24, in-camera documentation for redactions the department says protect victims. He ordered the underlying FBI interview notes, redacted and unredacted, for the FD-302 reports numbered EFTA01245620, EFTA02858481, EFTA02858491, and EFTA02858495. And he ordered the department to start reviewing and producing foreign-language material that may fall under the act, and to tell the court and the parties that the review was underway, on the same September 24 clock. If any piece of the order was unclear, Blanche had until September 21 to ask.

Blanche did not spend that week only on clarification. On Friday, September 18, at 8:45 p.m., the department moved for a partial stay pending appeal, ECF No. 46. The slice it wanted frozen was the foreign-language review, not a public dump of every remaining page. The motion asked for a ruling by the afternoon of September 21, a request later nudged to 8 p.m. in the reply. Sullivan’s September 21 order, ECF No. 49, is blunt about the procedure. Local Civil Rule 7(m) required a good-faith talk with Phang’s side before the motion was filed, and a statement in the motion about whether it was opposed. The court said the department did neither. It also noted that the filing landed over Yom Kippur without notice to the plaintiff. Sullivan wrote that the rule violation alone was reason to deny the motion, and that he would have denied it on the merits anyway, for the reasons in the June injunction opinion. He assumed, without deciding, that the September 16 order was even appealable.

Then he did the narrow thing a district judge sometimes does when an appeals court is about to be asked for the same relief. He denied the stay. He temporarily stayed only the foreign-language start-and-notice piece of the September 16 order, so Blanche could ask the D.C. Circuit to freeze that piece and move to expedite. The parties must file a joint notice, with recommendations for what should happen next, within three days after the circuit rules on that forthcoming motion. The temporary stay does not mention the FBI notes. It does not mention the victim-name documentation. Those chamber deliveries were still due at 11 a.m. on September 24.

An email is not a docket entry

By Friday, September 25, Phang was telling reporters the public docket had nothing on it from Thursday’s deadline. In an account by Erik De La Garza at Raw Story, she said everyone on her side had been watching for a filing and that nothing appeared. She also said Justice Department attorney Andrew Block emailed her lawyers a sentence she quoted as, “Yes, we complied with the court’s order.” Phang said she believes Blanche did turn over the unredacted and redacted handwritten notes from the four FBI interviews. She also said Judge Sullivan has not independently confirmed what arrived. Her September 25 video makes the same distinction: production claimed by the department’s lawyer, and a separate fight over the foreign-language stay in the court of appeals.

A claim of compliance delivered by email, with no public notice, is exactly the kind of fact a careful reader should not inflate. It is not proof the notes are complete. It is not proof they were withheld. It is not proof the September 24 chamber deadline was blown, and it is not proof the judge is satisfied. MeidasTouch reported that the department says it handed over unredacted handwritten notes from four interviews with a woman who alleges Trump sexually and physically abused her as a minor, and that a real question remains about what else was in the delivery. Michael Popok, in a Meidas clip posted September 25, described the government’s formal Answer another way: the department denied the core allegations, and it answered the accusation of missing and over-redacted Trump-related records by saying it had complied and had produced millions of pages. Page counts have been the department’s refrain since the winter. The AEGIS Alliance has already reported the department’s own concession that less than 1 percent of the files were out in early January. Millions of pages can still be a fraction.

Why the chamber fight is the whole case

Sullivan’s contempt warning from the summer is still the backdrop. He has said a contempt finding would be premature until an order is clear and a violation of that clear order is shown. The September 16 opinion gave Blanche a short window to say the order was ambiguous. The September 21 ruling says the stay motion was not that kind of question, and that the court would not reward a Friday-night filing that skipped the meet-and-confer. What remains is a judge reading notes in chambers, a plaintiff who says she was told by email that the notes arrived, and an appeals court that has been invited to freeze only the translation project.

The rest of the Epstein paper trail has not waited on this one docket. Survivors’ litigation against Bank of America resolved at $72.5 million. A Swiss bank’s financing of the New Hampshire property where Ghislaine Maxwell was hiding is its own documented chapter. Blanche’s own account of why he sits in the Attorney General’s chair, and of the calendar Congress wrote, is already part of the political file and of the deadline fight. Phang’s case is the piece with a judge attached.

Until Sullivan says, on the record, what he received at 11 a.m. on September 24, the honest status is narrower than a headline. The partial stay was denied. The foreign-language clock is paused only so the D.C. Circuit can be asked to pause it. The FBI notes were still due in chambers. Phang says the department told her, off the docket, that it complied. The public case page did not, by the next day, confirm the delivery. That gap is the story. The politics desk and the crime desk at The AEGIS Alliance will keep reading the docket, not the slogan.