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The Situation Room

3 Million Pages, 2,000 Videos From Epstein Files Released By DOJ. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired January 30, 2026 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:01:17]

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Any minute now, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is expected to hold a press conference at the Department of Justice. We're going to take you there live.

Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Pamela Brown. Wolf Blitzer is off. You're in The Situation Room.

And we begin this hour with that breaking news. Former CNN anchor Don Lemon has been taken into custody. Lemon was with dozens of anti- immigration protesters as they interrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota last week. Lemon has said he was there as a journalist, not a protester.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: I'm just here photographing. I'm not part of the group. I'm just here photographing. I'm a journalist. We don't know. That's what they're saying. So we're here just chronicling and reporting. We're not part of the activists, but we're here just reporting on them.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And that's why we're here, demanding justice for Renee Good and letting them know that this will not stand. They cannot pretend to be a house of God while harboring someone who is directing ICE agents to wreak havoc upon our community and who killed Renee Good, who almost killed a six-month-old baby. Enough is enough. I am a reverend, on top of being a lawyer and an activist. So I come here in the power of the almighty God for righteousness, truth, and justice.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our church had gathered for worship, which we do every Sunday, and we were interrupted by this group of protesters. We asked them to leave, and they obviously have not left.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, says that he was taken into custody by federal agents last night, and in a statement, Lowell said, "Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention, and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case. This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand. Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court."

And just last week, a federal magistrate judge rejected the Justice Department's initial attempt to bring charges against Lemon, a source previously told CNN. This morning, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted this to social media, announcing additional arrests. "At my direction early this morning -- all right, I'm going to actually stop here, go to DOJ, where the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is speaking. Let's listen.

TODD BLANCHE, DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: While on November 19th, 2025, directing the Department of Justice to produce all documents, files, records, videos, and images related to the investigations and prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I'm here today to talk about the Department's compliance with its production obligations under the act, around, I think, right now and continuing throughout the day-to-day as the indexing and uploading completes, we are producing responsive materials under the act.

We are also releasing today a letter we are transmitting to Congress and various internal protocols associated with our review. I want to take a moment to thank the professionals at the Department of Justice who met twice daily, sometimes more, for the last 75 days to get to where we are today. The leadership teams from the Office of the Attorney General, from the Deputy Attorney General's Office, the Associate Attorney General's Office, the Criminal Division, the National Security Division, the FBI, the Southern District of Florida, the Southern District of New York, and the Northern District of New York all gave up many hours every single day on top of their other, of course, full-time obligations to fulfill President Trump's promise of transparency to the American people.

[11:05:23]

I also want to thank the more than 500 lawyers and professionals across all those divisions that I just mentioned and others who worked long days, nights, weekends, Christmas, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, nights, weekends, and holidays to complete this production. These highly trained reviewers spend their careers putting bad guys in jail and effectuating the mission of the Department. And to a person, they work tirelessly to protect victims and comply with the Act since its passage. So thank you to all of them.

Today, we are producing more than 3 million pages, including more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. In total, that means that the Department produced approximately 3.5 million pages in compliance with the Act. Just a quick note about the videos and images, the 2,000 videos and 180,000 images are not all videos and images taken by Mr. Epstein or someone around him. They include large quantities of commercial pornography and images that were seized from Epstein's devices, but which he did not take or that someone around him did not take.

Some of the videos, though, and some of the images do appear to be taken by Mr. Epstein or by others around him. Now, I want to talk for a few minutes about the Department's document identification and review protocols. It consisted of multiple layers of review and quality control designed to ensure compliance under the Act and protect victims.

On top of the review protocols that the Department had in place, the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York employed an additional review protocol to ensure compliance with a court order requiring United States Attorney Jay Clayton to certify that with respect to certain materials, a large quantity of the materials, a rigorous process was undertaken to protect victims against any clearly unwarranted invasion of their personal privacy.

The Department's collection effort resulted in more than 6 million pages being identified as potentially responsive, including Department and FBI e-mails, interview summaries, images, videos, and various other materials collected and generated during the various investigations and prosecutions that the Act covered. We erred on the side of over-collecting of materials from various sources to best ensure maximum transparency and compliance, which necessarily means that the number of responsive pages is significantly smaller than the total number of pages initially collected.

That's why I mentioned a moment ago we're releasing more than 3 million pages today and not the 6 million pages that we collected. I want to address what we didn't produce. The categories of documents withheld include those permitted under the Act to be withheld, files that contain personally identified information of victims or victims' personal and medical files, and similar files, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

Any depiction of CSAM or child pornography was obviously excluded, anything that would jeopardize an active federal investigation. And finally, anything that depicts or contains images of death, physical abuse, or injury, also not produced. Although the Act allows for withholding for items necessary to keep secret in the interest of national security or foreign policy, no files are being withheld or redacted on that basis.

Further, as we previously stated in our December 19th letter of last year, the Department withheld or redacted files covered by various privileges, as we always do, including deliberative process privilege, work product privilege, and attorney-client privilege. As you all know, under the Act, the Department must subsequently submit to the House and Senate committees on the Judiciary a report listing all categories of records released and withheld, a summary of redactions made, including the legal basis for such redactions, and a list of all government officials and politically exposed persons named or referenced in the Act. We will do so in due course as required under the Act.

[11:10:05]

I want to talk for just a moment about the redactions that will be obvious to anyone who reviews the materials that we just produced today. In addition to the documentary redactions, which includes personal identifying information, victim information, and other privileges, there is extensive redactions to images and videos.

To protect victims, we redacted every woman depicted in any image or video, with the exception of Ms. Maxwell. We did not redact images of any men, unless it was impossible to redact the woman without also redacting the man. To this end, though, and to ensure transparency, if any member of Congress wishes to review any portions of the response of production in any unredacted form, they're welcome to make arrangements with the Department to do so, and we're happy to do that.

I want to talk for a minute about something that is important. Every single day of the year, the Department of Justice investigates and prosecutes those who abuse and traffic young women and children. Just last year, the FBI located over 2,700 victims of child exploitation. The Department of Justice found and terminated 3.8 million dark web pedophile accounts. In August, we charged 11 defendants for extensive sex trafficking in Los Angeles of illegal immigrants and underage women. Last month, we charged five men who were engaged in a sadistic extortion network of deranged young men abusing women.

Over the past several months, last summer and into the fall, we executed Operation Restore Justice, rescuing 205 child victims and arresting 293 offenders. I point this out because I take umbrage at the suggestion, which is totally false, that the Attorney General or this Department does not take child exploitation or sex trafficking seriously, or that we somehow do not want to protect victims. We do.

There are some select members of Congress and some in the public eye, including those most critical of our efforts at full transparency under the Act, who remain silent as to all the work that we have done and continue to do every day in this space, while quickly pointing a finger at the Attorney General or this Department because we were careful in our review of millions of pages of documents over the past two months.

The Attorney General, the Director of the FBI, and our partners throughout this administration work hard every single day to protect the most vulnerable among us. With the production of this magnitude, mistakes are inevitable. We, of course, want to immediately correct any redaction errors that our team may have made, and so the Department has established an e-mail inbox for victims to reach us directly to correct redactions and any concerns when appropriate. That's been in existence since December, and we've been doing that since then.

Finally, a very small portion of the documents collected pursuant to the Act include materials that a law firm produced to the SDNY in 2019 pursuant to a grand jury subpoena. This was during the criminal investigation of Ms. Maxwell. We determined it would be prudent to seek an order from the court in the Southern District of New York seeking production of these materials subject to the protective order in that civil lawsuit.

To that end, the Department has filed that motion with the appropriate judge in the SDNY, and if that motion is granted, we'll release those materials with appropriate redactions immediately. Today's release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance with the Act. The Department has engaged in an unprecedented and extensive effort to do so.

After submitting the final report to Congress as required under the Act and publishing the written justifications for redactions in the Federal Register, the Department's obligations under the Act will be completed. I'm happy to take any questions anybody has about that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Todd, I'd like to ask you about this, and I have a Minnesota question for you. On the Epstein release today, it was recently made public that Ghislaine Maxwell claims more than two dozen men signed secret agreements with the federal government not to be prosecuted. What is your reaction to that, and what does that mean for her case?

[11:15:01]

BLANCHE: I read an article that described, I wasn't aware that it was actual men that she's claiming. I thought it was accomplices, which I'm not sure if that's a reference to some of the financial institutions or other individuals that --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Her accomplices, 25.

BLANCHE: So, yes, I don't have a reaction to her filing. I can tell you that we reviewed, as I just described, every single piece of paper that we have associated with these investigations, Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, and to the extent that such arrangements exist, I'm not aware of them.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And on to Minnesota, if I may ask you real quick, that's in the topic, in the headlines right now. There's new video of a man believed to be Alex Pretti, who's spitting, who's kicking out a taillight of a law enforcement vehicle. Does that change the perception of a potential DOJ investigation? Is there going to be a civil rights investigation into his death? Where does that land now that that video's out? Then I have a quick follow-up on that.

BLANCHE: I don't -- so, look, I don't think a single video should change any perception the Department of Justice may or may not have about that tragic occurrence last Saturday. We've said repeatedly over the past week that, of course, this is something that we're investigating, and we are. That's what we would always do in circumstances like this.

And so there's an investigation that's ongoing, which I'm not going to talk about. But just, look, the problem is an initial reaction to a particular video, one or another. You're talking about one that happened, apparently, some days ahead of last Saturday.

It's an investigation. So an investigation necessarily means just that. It means talking to witnesses. It means looking at documentary evidence, sending subpoenas if you have to. And the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has the best experts in the world at this. They've been doing it for decades. And so I expect that investigation will proceed with those parameters in mind. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you looking at a nexus of left-wing groups? This DOJ said that that's something that you guys were concerned about. Are you following money? Are you looking at a potential that all of this may be related somewhere?

BLANCHE: I mean, yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Attorney General. You said in your remarks that you've withheld some documents because of ongoing investigations. I've done this long enough to know you can't comment on ongoing investigations. But can you say a little bit more because as you know, the department has been criticized for not bringing charges against more people. Are there still open investigations related to Jeffrey Epstein?

BLANCHE: So what I was laying out in my comments is the statutory, what the statute talks about, about what we can withhold and the reasons we can withhold it. I wasn't pointing to any particular, I wasn't trying to be coy or otherwise suggest there's some investigation. As you all know, Jay Clayton in New York is in charge of any potential investigations, and I'm not going to comment beyond that on that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You were referring to Clayton.

BLANCHE: Excuse me?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You were referring to Clayton's investigation.

BLANCHE: I wasn't referring to anything. I was just saying that Congress, in their wisdom, allowed us to withhold documents if there were ongoing criminal investigations. That's one of the four reasons. I wanted to make clear, with respect to any national security information, that we were not withholding -- there's not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we're withholding. We're actually not withholding anything based upon NDI.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Deputy Attorney General Blanche, thank you for your time. Two questions for you. Number one, pushing politics aside and everyone else aside, some of the victims of Epstein have expressed frustration with the entire process. I want to give you the opportunity to speak directly to them.

BLANCHE: Well, I don't know what you're speaking to. I mean, if there's frustration with, "the entire process," same here. I mean, you have a situation where, for many, many years, nobody even breathed a word about Jeffrey Epstein, and then all of a sudden, it was all anybody would talk about going into the last spring and summer, culminating in the passage of the Transparency Act.

And President Trump has said for years what I think everybody will find to be exactly true, which is detailing his relationship and lack thereof with Mr. Epstein and what he thought about Mr. Epstein, and notwithstanding what the Department has been saying for a very long time, we're still where we are today. Listen, victims of Mr. Epstein have gone through unspeakable pain, and there's nobody that should say anything differently. And I -- to the extent that there's frustration, I understand where that comes from, just from what we know about Mr. Epstein. I hope the work that the men and women within this Department have done over the past two months hopefully is able to bring closure. I think that what we told our reviewers is that that was the goal.

[11:20:24]

You know, there's this mantra out there that, oh, you know, the Department of Justice is supposed to protect Donald J. Trump, and that's what we were telling. That's not true. That was never the case. We are always concerned about the victims. When we said that we were not legally allowed to release documents, that's a fact. That was true. It remains true today. And then with the Act's passage, we are able now and directed to release documents, which is what we are doing. But so hopefully some of those frustrations are now eased.

Listen, any victim that wants to speak with the Department has done so, hopefully. If not, they should. The prosecutors from this case in New York have given hundreds if not thousands of hours to working with victims, and that's what we do every day, and that's what we did in this case as well, so.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Very quickly, can you assure the American public that President Trump, like every other prominent person whose name came up in relation to the Epstein files, that all documents, photos, and anything relevant to him connected to the case are being released?

BLANCHE: I mean, yes. I can assure that we complied with the statute, we complied with the Act, and there is no -- we did not protect President Trump, we didn't protect or not protect anybody. I mean, I think that we -- that there's a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents.

And there's -- it's not -- there's nothing I can do about that. But President Trump, of all the people in Washington, D.C., and around this country, that have said for years the same consistent message about Jeffrey Epstein is President Trump. And so there's not been a change of course or anything, and certainly his direction to the American people and the Department of -- sorry, his direction to the Department of Justice was to be as transparent, release the files, be as transparent as we can, and that's exactly what we did.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I want to clarify your remarks on the Alex Pretti killing. Are you saying that the Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into his death?

BLANCHE: Yes. Yes, I mean, look, and I know there's a lot of -- there's been a lot of discussion among the media around that, but just think about what that means. All that that means is that DHS, as they've -- as the Secretary has said, is conducting an investigation, as they should and as they do every time there's a tragic event like this. And the FBI, in their role, which is a separate role from DHS, is also take -- looking into it and conducting an investigation. And that's not -- that shouldn't be treated as making news. We've said that for a week, and it remains as true today as it was last Sunday when I said it.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Two questions for you, one on topic and one separate. Yes, two questions for you, one on topic and one separate. On topic, do you have any information that you could just share? Because 3 million documents is a lot for people who are watching this at home. Are there any new names or new people, public people in positions of power who you're hoping found in these filings?

BLANCHE: I don't have anything to share about what's new or not new. And there's -- no, I don't have anything to share about that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And to follow up on that, do you have a reaction to the arrest of Don Lemon overnight?

BLANCHE: Do I have a reaction to what?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To Don Lemon's arrest overnight?

BLANCHE: Do I have a reaction to it? I don't know what that means. What are you looking for me to do, jump up and down? No, I don't have a reaction to it. I don't know that the charges are unsealed yet. So, no, I can't. I'm not going to comment on that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you. You said this is the end of the Epstein, of your review of the Epstein files. So, just to clarify, are -- is the public going to learn the identities of the men who abused the girls with the information that you're releasing? And if not, why not? And then I have a quick follow-up.

BLANCHE: You just baked in an assumption into your question that I have never said and I don't know to be true. Is the public going to learn about men that abused these girls? What does that mean? I don't understand what that means.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, I mean, the men who abused the young women through Epstein's --

BLANCHE: We said in July, and it remains as true today as it was in July, if we had information, we meaning the Department of Justice, about men who abused women, we would prosecute them, right? We talked about the work that we're doing. That's why I said that. I said this earlier. There's this built-in assumption that somehow there's this hidden tranche of information of men that we know about that we're covering up or that we're choosing not to prosecute. That is not the case.

[11:25:11]

I don't know whether there are men out there that abuse these women. If we learn about information and evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But I don't think that the public or you all are going to uncover men within the Epstein files that abuse women, unfortunately. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just a follow-up. On the investigation into Federal Chairman Jerome Powell, is the Justice Department -- what's the status of that investigation? Now that President Trump has nominated a new Fed chair, are you -- is the Justice Department looking to bring a close to the investigation into Chairman Powell as soon as possible?

BLANCHE: I don't have a comment on that, on the subpoenas that were issued. I don't think the timing of President Trump's decision to nominate somebody is a controlling factor in any investigation.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi, I just wanted to follow up on Alana's question. So you're saying that the shooting investigation of Alex Pretti is now a civil rights investigation. You're saying, you're implying that that's always been the case. Can you also say, has that -- what about the shooting of Renee Good? I mean, is she -- is that -- why or why not is that a civil rights investigation?

BLANCHE: I didn't say it was always a case. I said it's the same thing that we said as of last Sunday with respect to last weekend. There are thousands, unfortunately, of law enforcement events every year where somebody is shot. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice does not investigate every one of those shootings. There has to be circumstances or facts, or maybe unknown facts, but certainly circumstances that warrant an investigation.

So when we talked about, when I talked about last weekend and when others have talked about this week, the fact that President Trump has said repeatedly, of course, this is something we're going to investigate. That's what I meant about what we're doing. It doesn't mean that every time that there's a federal officer-related shooting, that that's something civil rights takes up. It depends on the circumstances.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just to follow up on that, can you just --

BLANCHE: Go ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: -- I know you can't be specific about details of the investigation, but can you kind of just characterize the scope of the Pretti investigation, what kinds of things that they'll be looking for, and who will be involved?

BLANCHE: Well, I mean, it's an investigation, so what do we think we're looking at? We're looking at everything that would shed light on what happened that day and in the days and weeks leading up to what happened, and that's like any investigation that the Department of Justice and the FBI does every day. It means we're looking at videos, talking to witnesses, trying to understand what happened.

I mean, you're talking about an incredibly tragic morning, and then trying to unwind and investigate that, it takes a lot of time. I'm not going to prejudice what they're doing or not doing by laying any markers, but I expect that the folks that are doing this are the most experienced in this space and are doing that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, so to follow up on that, how would a civil rights investigation work with DHS taking the lead, which is what was said over the weekend? And are prosecutors in Minnesota, I mean, who is involved in this? We know that there's a lot of frustration within the Department, both in Minnesota and the Civil Rights Division, that they feel they are not being brought in, and they are the experts here. So just to follow up, how would this work with DHS taking the lead, and who is from DOJ involved in this investigation?

BLANCHE: I don't think that -- look, I think any time there's a -- every single federal agency, including DHS, has a process that they use when there's something like this that happens, an internal review, investigation, however you want to call it. That's what DHS was doing as they do every single time something like this happened. There was nothing unique to these facts. There might have been outsized focus on it because of what happened, but DHS was doing an investigation.

I don't know that will stop. I don't expect that investigation to stop because we're investigating and of course we're coordinating with them. We're not -- there's nothing -- we're not working against them or. But it's a -- there's, I suppose, potentially separate goals or potential goals in the two investigations. I mean, DHS is conducting an investigation, and then the FBI conducts an investigation. It's not as if one goes one way and one goes the other, but they are their own investigations.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Very clearly said on Sunday that HSI is leading the investigation and he did not want to overstep and say anything. Was that not true anymore or was that true at the time?

[11:29:52]

BLANCHE: I don't think it's fair to say whether it's true anymore. OK. And I don't think it's also -- I don't want to say who's lead or not lead. I don't even really know what that means in the course of an investigation. There's the FBI's investigating. They are for sure coordinating with Secretary Noem and her folks as well.