In a stunning eleventh-hour development, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Wednesday that federal investigators have uncovered more than one million additional documents potentially
linked to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The disclosure, made via a statement on social media site X, revealed that the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI recently identified this massive trove of new material. This discovery has effectively halted the timeline for a full public disclosure, with the DOJ stating it may now take a “few more weeks” to process the files for release.
The announcement comes at a period of intense political friction. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in November 2025, had mandated a hard deadline of December 19 for the release of all unclassified records. While the DOJ began a staggered rollout last Friday, it has faced bipartisan backlash for missing the total disclosure deadline and for the extensive redactions applied to the initial batches. The “Christmas Eve news dump” of a million further records has intensified these criticisms. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer characterised the delay as a “blatant cover-up”, while Representative Ro Khanna and Representative Thomas Massie have threatened to initiate contempt hearings against Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The Justice Department has defended the delay by emphasising the legal and ethical necessity of protecting survivors. A team of approximately 200 analysts is reportedly working “around the clock” to review the new documents, which originate from decades of FBI surveillance and Manhattan-based federal prosecutions. Officials noted that the review process is exceptionally slow because many of the records contain the names of victims and sensitive grand jury testimony that require painstaking manual redaction.
Before this latest discovery, the DOJ had already released several thousand files, including never-before-seen grand jury transcripts and photographs from Epstein’s properties. However, many of those documents were heavily blacked out, particularly in sections referring to “politically exposed individuals”. With the volume of material now exceeding 4.6 million total records—many of which may be duplicates—the department remains under immense pressure to prove its commitment to transparency. For the survivors and the public, the question remains whether this new “million-document” trove will finally shed light on Epstein’s high-profile associates or if it serves as a final administrative barrier to full disclosure.
