The US Department of Justice has announced the release of more than 3 million documents in the case of American financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of sexually exploiting minors.
Elchi.az reports that this was stated on the ministry’s website.
This time, 2,000 videos and 180,000 photos were published. According to the Department of Justice, a total of 3.5 million documents have been published in this case, including previous files.
Epstein was detained on July 6, 2019, by law enforcement agencies in New York State. The Prosecutor’s Office announced that there was evidence that dozens of underage girls were brought to his home in Manhattan in 2002–2005. The youngest of them was 14 years old. Epstein’s friends and acquaintances included numerous current and former government officials, former heads of state, large businessmen, and show business stars not only from the United States but also from many other countries. Criminal prosecution against the financier in the United States was stopped in August 2019 after he committed suicide in his prison cell.
In his election campaign statements, Trump repeatedly promised to publish all materials related to the case, but after becoming the US President, he did not want to publish them for a long time. On November 20, Trump signed a decree on the publication of materials on the Epstein case within 30 days. At the end of December, the Department of Justice published some files, but critics repeatedly stated that not everything had been published. In addition, part of the information was deleted in the published documents. The media writes that many things have been edited and deleted in the files published today as well.
In response to this criticism, US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who held a press conference regarding the publication of new files, said that the Department of Justice could not publish these documents earlier because it was necessary to protect the victims. According to him, the Department of Justice had to check very large documents and remove information that could harm the victims.