Trump’s DOJ exposed Epstein survivors’ addresses
DoJ exposed Epstein survivors' addresses and prosecuted a wrongly deported man as Todd Blanche sought Senate confirmation as attorney general.
The Justice Department exposed Epstein survivors’ addresses while shielding their alleged abusers, then prosecuted a wrongly deported man out of what a judge called vindictive motive.
Epstein survivors addresses exposed: who paid the price Epstein files released by the department in January carried survivors’ names, phone numbers and home addresses, including those of more than two dozen minors, while many accused abusers stayed redacted. One victim’s name appeared 20 times in a single document. After she reported it, the department redacted three more instances and left 17.
“If the Department of Justice cannot faithfully carry out a law specifically enacted to protect victims in one of the most significant sex trafficking cases in American history, why should any victim trust it to protect them?” survivor Liz Stein wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Fellow survivor Jess Michaels called it “a process that failed survivors,” not a technical mistake. Virginia Giuffre’s family put it plainer: “Survivors are being exposed while those who may have participated in or enabled these crimes are protected. That is a betrayal of justice.”
Kilmar Ábrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador in error, brought back, then charged with human smuggling over a 2022 traffic stop. In May, Judge Waverly Crenshaw threw the case out, ruling that public statements from the man now running the department “taints the investigation with a vindictive motive” and amounted to “an abuse of prosecuting power.”
The man running the department
That man is Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal defence lawyer and acting attorney general since April. He appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday for the opening day of hearings to make the job permanent.
Two days earlier, a federal judge voided a settlement Blanche’s department struck in Trump’s own $10bn lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns. Judge Kathleen Williams ruled the deal unlawful and self-dealing, citing Blanche’s “apparent capacity to speak for both Plaintiffs and Defendants.” It would have handed $1.8bn to a fund compensating people supposedly targeted by government “weaponisation” and shielded Trump, his two eldest sons and his companies from future tax claims. Williams referred the lawyers who signed it to state bar authorities.
Blanche told reporters at the hearing that the fund “is dead, it’s not coming back to life.” Asked what he would tell Epstein’s victims, he said he was “willing to meet with them any time.” Take him at his word on both, and the record still shows a department that settled its boss’s tax bill with public money while trafficked girls’ addresses sat exposed online.
James Comey and John Brennan are also being pursued by Blanche’s department, on charges and probes judges and their own lawyers call politically driven. They are not the story’s victims. They spent careers running the same security state now being turned on them, and their footnote here is that nobody is safe from a Justice Department run as a client’s private law firm.
Two Republicans on the committee, Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, remain undecided. One no vote could sink the nomination.
