- - DOJ pleads with lawyers to get through ‘grind’ of Epstein files as criticism of redactions continues

Katelyn Polantz, CNNJanuary 14, 2026 at 4:25 AM

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Released documents from disgraced late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including a sheaf of entirely redacted pages, are seen in this handout released by the US Justice Department and printed and arranged for a photograph by Reuters in Washington, DC on December 19. - Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The Justice Department is still struggling to process the massive trove of Epstein files and is prodding hundreds of lawyers reviewing pages to work faster, according to a recent email from DOJ leadership and court filings over the past few days.

“It is a grind,” the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division Tysen Duva wrote on Friday to the document review team who reports to him. “While we certainly encourage aggressive overachievers, we need reviewers to hit the 1,000-page mark each day.”

The email is the latest indication of how burdensome the task has become for the Justice Department to make the Epstein files public in compliance with a transparency law, with redactions. It was first reported by Bloomberg News.

“No one is suggesting this is how we wanted to start the year in terms of our focus,” Duva wrote. “But, this is the task at hand. We must complete it. The sooner that we do, the sooner this is over.”

The Justice Department has added lawyers in Washington, New York and Florida to the review effort.

As of last week, lawyers in Duva’s division had reviewed around 209,000 pages of the files, he said. Duva noted some of the criminal division’s lawyers had reviewed “close to none,” encouraging each lawyer to process at least 1,000 a day.

One person had reviewed more than 13,000 pages, Duva said.

Also on Tuesday, US House members Ro Khanna, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, complained to a federal judge about their “urgent and grave concerns about DOJ’s failure to comply with the act.”

The judge, Paul Engelmayer in New York, oversees the protection of victims of Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, and hasn’t decided yet on a request from the congressmen to bring in an independent third-party to check the Justice Department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. DOJ is set to respond in court by Friday.

Khanna and Massie have raised additional concerns that the Trump administration may improperly redact many of the files, either by releasing information they shouldn’t have, or blacking out too much.

Because the department hasn’t completed processing the files or given specific descriptions to Congress about the redactions and withholdings it’s making, it’s not known ultimately what will be included in the final Epstein files cache the department is publishing online.

The Justice Department last week said in court it had reviewed about 12,000 documents out of more than 2 million.

DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

CNN’s Aleena Fayaz contributed to this report.

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