NY judge wants answers after lawmakers slam Trump DOJ over delay in release of Epstein files

Molly Crane-Newman, New York Daily News on Jan 13, 2026

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NEW YORK — A Manhattan judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump Justice Department to respond to demands from congressional lawmakers that he appoint a special master to facilitate the release of files gathered on deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and accusations that the government is disobeying the law, according to court docs filed Tuesday.

Counsel for Rep. Ro Khanna, D-CA, and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KT, who wrote to the court last week, contacted the judge presiding over Ghislaine Maxwell’s Manhattan case with further arguments on the matter late Monday, seeking to intervene in legal proceedings over the so-called “Epstein files” and urging him to install an independent party to oversee the government’s handling of the release.

Manhattan Federal Judge Paul Engelmayer addressed the request in a Tuesday filing. He ordered briefing on the matter, directing the DOJ to address by Friday the lawmakers’ attempt to get involved and opine on whether he has the authority to rule on the government’s compliance with the legislation, which was almost unanimously passed by Congress in November and signed into law by President Donald Trump.

Engelmayer and the judge who presided over Epstein’s case were involved in releasing a small segment of the files, covering materials from the grand jury proceedings against Epstein and Maxwell that led to their arrests. The judges lifted protective orders that had for years barred prosecutors and defense lawyers from sharing information gathered in the cases, and ordered the government to protect victims’ privacy at all costs.

“As the leads of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, we have urgent and grave concerns about DOJ’s failure to comply with the Act as well as the Department’s violations of this Court’s order,” Khanna and Massie wrote to the judge in a Jan. 8 letter.

“Absent an independent process, as outlined above, we do not believe the DOJ will produce the records that are required by the Act and what it has represented to this Court.”

Should Maxwell wish to be heard on the matter, the judge said she should respond by Friday.

The Epstein files legislation required the DOJ to release everything the agency has gathered on Epstein over decades by Dec. 19. While thousands of documents have been released to the public, federal law enforcement officials have said there are many millions more to be reviewed.

In their initial letter to the judge, Massie and Khanna said, “There is reasonable suspicion that the DOJ has overstated the scope of responsive materials, thereby portraying compliance as unmanageable and effectively delaying disclosure.”

Epstein was found dead at age 66 in his cell in August 2019 at the since-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, around a month after his arrest on sweeping sex trafficking charges, with his death officially ruled a suicide.

Authorities have estimated Epstein harmed more than 1,000 women and girls over his lifetime at his lavish properties in New York, Florida, and his private Caribbean island. Evidence at the trial against Maxwell established that the pair typically targeted girls from disadvantaged backgrounds and daughters of poor single mothers to abuse.

Lawmakers in both parties who passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act were responding to immense pressure from the public to reveal powerful figures who may have known about the abuse and engaged in it. The files released to the public thus far have brought many elements of Epstein’s operation, and authorities’ awareness of it, into sharper focus, but they have not pulled the mask off previously unidentified potential co-conspirators.

The multimillionaire wealth manager, who had a working-class upbringing in Coney Island, kept company with some of the world’s most influential figures, including Presidents Trump and Bill Clinton and former British prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was stripped of his title due to his friendship with the perverted financier.

The only person criminally convicted in connection with Epstein’s unbridled depravity was Maxwell. The British former socialite, who turned 64 on Christmas Day, was convicted at trial in December 2021 of facilitating his sexual abuse and exploitation of teenage girls and young women. She is currently representing herself in a bid to get out of prison, after her appeal failed.

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