Documents Suggest Classified Material and Thousands of Pages Are Missing From Epstein Files

Attorney General Todd Blanche has repeatedly said the Epstein files contain no hidden national security material. But the contents of at least three documents in the released records indicate that classified information was among the files gathered by the Justice Department, according to a CBS News review.

When the releases began last winter, Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, noted that the Epstein Files Transparency Act allowed information to be withheld for national security or foreign policy reasons. He said, "no files are being withheld or redacted on that basis." He also rejected the idea of a secret trove, saying, "There's not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we're withholding."

One document in the files shows that Blanche's own Office of the Deputy Attorney General received classified Epstein material in March 2025. By law, material can be classified only for national security purposes. What was classified, and why, remains unknown.

An eight-page timeline of the FBI New York office's efforts to deliver its files to Justice Department headquarters records a March 25, 2025 delivery of 16 Epstein items to the deputy attorney general's office. Two of them are described as "Epstein Transparency Project - Classified Material" and "CDs with classified materials (x2)." An email sent the same day by the unit chief of the FBI's National Security Classification Operations Unit says three documents were "identified that remain classified." Parts of that email, including the recipient's identity, are redacted, and it is unclear whether the email and the timeline refer to the same material.

The review also examined the Bates numbers, the page-level codes used to organize large document sets. Each released page carries an EFTA number, and the sequence runs to about 2.86 million pages. Many pages also carry older numbers from earlier legal cases or bank records. In tens of thousands of instances, the EFTA number rises by one while the older numbers jump by two or more, which suggests pages were removed after the Justice Department obtained them.

Among the apparent gaps are financial records. A series of about 4,500 images of checks from Epstein's accounts is missing 66 images, sometimes only the front or back. "Financial records were not a permissible category for removal," said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. A separate numbering sequence marked "R1," covering about 995,000 released pages, points to roughly 1.2 million pages removed between an earlier review and the final release, mostly entire email exchanges.

One possible explanation is deduplication. Instructions to Justice Department attorneys said earlier messages in an email chain could be marked as duplicates if the most inclusive email had already been reviewed. But duplicate emails still appear throughout the files, and errors could have led to important messages being deleted. Hundreds of attorneys worked under a compressed timeline, so honest mistakes are possible, though without a roadmap to the removals that cannot be determined.

The Justice Department did not respond to recent CBS News inquiries. It has previously said every document required for release has been released and that the rest were unrelated, privileged or duplicative. It has acknowledged some errors, including removing and then restoring a photo of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Independent journalist Katie Phang has sued the department seeking more files and an explanation of the redactions. A federal judge has made several rulings in her favor, which the department is appealing, and she is asking the court to appoint a special master. Attorney Stanley Brand, a veteran litigator, said the process has "inhibited public trust in what is ultimately released," adding that such disclosures fuel suspicion that something is not being seen.