A federal judge has told President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to stop treating the Epstein files that name him like an ordinary paperwork pile. On September 30, 2026, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered expedited processing of Freedom of Information Act requests for investigative records that mention Trump or Mar-a-Lago, and for the internal messages showing how his senior officials handled those files.
裁决 民主捍卫者基金诉美国司法部 does not order an instant public dump. Kollar-Kotelly held that the department’s own rules already required these searches to jump the line, because the subject raises possible questions about government integrity and public confidence. Trump campaigned on opening the Epstein files. His administration then spent more than a year arguing about pace, redactions, and which names the public was allowed to see.
法庭命令司法部先行动
Democracy Defenders Fund filed the core request on July 22, 2025, with the Criminal Division. It asked for records from the federal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell that mention Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, President Trump, name variations, Mar-a-Lago, or any code name used for the president or the Palm Beach estate. Kollar-Kotelly granted expedited processing for that request in full. Her 备忘录意见 请求显示媒体对调查和这些关键词有广泛和特殊的兴趣。
7月22日的请求寻求调查记录,其中提到了唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)或马尔-阿-拉戈(Mar-a-Lago),棕榈滩庄园现在是法院下令搜查的中心.
Two matching requests went out on July 28, 2025, to the Criminal Division and to the offices of the attorney general and the deputy attorney general. They cover records from January 20, 2025, forward. They seek communications about Epstein or Maxwell, including messages on personal devices, calendars and meeting materials, documents that identify clients or associates such as flight logs, and communications about how officials should handle or flag references to Trump or Mar-a-Lago.
The named officials are then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, FBI Director Kash Patel, and then-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The judge moved most of those July 28 requests to the front of the queue. She cut back the pieces that swept in any Justice Department official, limiting priority treatment to the senior officials actually named. A request for expedition, under earlier D.C. precedent she applied, has to be reasonably tailored to the controversy generating the coverage.
为什么法官说 公众信任是在线
快速处理 28 《刑法》第16.5(e)(1)(四)条 is required when a request involves a matter of widespread and exceptional media interest in which there exist possible questions about the government’s integrity that affect public confidence. The department denied that treatment. Democracy Defenders Fund sued on August 21, 2025. Kollar-Kotelly reviewed the refusal afresh and treated it as a constructive denial of the department’s own rule.
The opinion tracks the record the group put in front of her. Trump said in the 2024 campaign that he would declassify the Epstein files. On February 21, 2025, Bondi was asked on Fox News whether a client list would be released. Phase 1 binders that followed were dismissed as a repackaging of material already public. A July 7, 2025, memo said investigators had found no incriminating client list, and the backlash was bipartisan. A Reuters poll on July 15 and 16, 2025, found that 69 percent of Americans believed the government was concealing information about Epstein’s clients.
The court also cited a July 18, 2025, letter from Senator Dick Durbin describing a March 2025 review in which Bondi pressed roughly 1,000 FBI personnel, working around the clock, to examine about 100,000 Epstein-related records and flag any that mentioned Trump. The same week, Bondi and Blanche signed a New York motion to unseal grand jury testimony.
这些要求是用来揭露的
特朗普与爱泼斯坦的社会联系并不是为这场诉讼而发明的谣言. 两人在同一个棕榈滩和曼哈顿圈子里移动了多年. 飞行记录后来显示特朗普在爱泼斯坦的喷气机上比他公开否认暗示的更频繁,这是一个漏洞. AEGIS联盟在联邦检察官的信之后审查 将更多的出行记录在案。 特朗普说他禁止爱泼斯坦进入马拉戈. 他没有用文件来解释 当联邦调查局的审查员开始在有他的名字的网页上打上标记时 他的行政部门做了什么
That is the hole the July 28 requests are shaped to fill. They ask for the messages, calendars, and handling instructions of the officials who ran the review. Those five were in a position to decide which pages moved, which names disappeared under a black box, and which campaign promises survived the file room.
Patel has been pressed in Congress on whether Trump’s name was scrubbed while agents were pulled off other work. He has rejected that account. The court did not adopt either version as proven fact. It held that the dispute is public enough that the records have to move ahead of the ordinary line. 早点报道布兰奇事件和错过披露最后期限 已显示该行政部门在法院日期再拖延多久。
片面的胜利 仍然留有余地
监督者并没有得到它所要求的一切。 Kollar-Kotelly否认了远征 以单独的迫切需求轨道 《新闻自由法》. That track applies when the requester is primarily engaged in disseminating information and there is an urgency to inform the public. On this record, the judge found Democracy Defenders Fund is mainly a litigation and advocacy group. Publishing what it learns is incidental to that work, so the statutory claim failed.
快速处理将这些请求移出 FOIA 队列 。 它并不强迫司法部立即出版每一页。
Priority processing means a faster search and response. It does not waive exemptions. Victim identities, grand jury secrecy, and law-enforcement privileges can still black out pages. If the department over-redacts or under-searches, the fight returns to the same court. Norm Eisen, executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, said stalling had been the tactic and that it stops now. The order is a lever, not the binders.
该命令如何与透明度法相冲突 特朗普签署
Congress already tried the direct route. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by Trump on November 19, 2025, told the attorney general to publish unclassified files on Epstein, Maxwell, and their associates by December 19, 2025. The department posted batches that month and again on January 30, 2026, then said it had complied after releasing about 3.5 million pages. 赞助联盟在2026年的 January 报告 之前承认只有一分钱没了 后来的下降并没有结束争论。
2026年9月10日 (英语). 民主卫士基金说 FBI records from its FOIA litigation showed emails among Patel, Bongino, and Bove tracking the March 2025 review. The group said many of those messages never appeared in the Epstein Library, or appeared with officials’ names stripped, even though the same names were readable in the FOIA copies. It also said the department had reviewed a purported 6 million pages and released 3.5 million. If that accounting holds, the library the public was told was complete is still missing the paper trail of the people who decided what the public would see.
同日下午法院命令,参议院财务委员会 排名成员Ron Wyden 要求 司法部长托德·布兰奇和联邦调查局局长喀什·帕特尔 交出了联邦调查局Epstein调查的采访报告 包括对银行雇员的采访 Wyden说,至少有一次银行家的采访没有向公众和国会公开。 记者Katie Phang提起的诉讼 已经指控部门 阻挠充分披露。 这个模式不再是一个错过的最后期限。
这些文件移动时公众应该看什么
Eisen said the public deserves answers about who and what is in the Epstein files, and that what the department has produced falls far short of what Congress mandated. His group will hold the department to the order until Americans can judge the records themselves. The 10月1日的声明 承诺进行更多的诉讼,而不是声称箱子是打开的。
Three tests will show whether the order means anything. The Criminal Division has to search for Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the code names in the request, instead of pointing at the library and calling the job finished. Messages on personal devices have to be searched or the refusal defended in court. Redactions have to protect victims, not the officials who gave the orders. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence. Epstein died in federal custody in 2019. The open question is which powerful men the files still name, and who in Trump’s government decided the public should not be first to know.
Bondi的去除没有重置文件. 布兰奇坚持要改变 和爱泼斯坦无关. 现在移动的请求是写作的,而两人仍然坐在主持审查的指挥链上。 如果通信存在,他们会显示这种坚持是否与论文相符。
相关报告载于 犯罪新闻, 政治,以及 美国新闻 从赞助联盟,包括 吉斯莱恩·麦克斯韦尔被捕.
