On April 23, the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Justice announced an audit of the department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the law signed by President Donald Trump on November 19, 2025, that required the Attorney General to release every unclassified record in the department’s possession related to the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell within 30 days of enactment. The audit, announced by Deputy Inspector General William M. Blier in a brief notice posted to the OIG website, has three preliminary objectives, each tied to a stage of the disclosure process: the department’s identification and collection of responsive materials; its guidance for redacting or withholding those materials under the Act; and its handling of post-release “publication concerns,” the OIG’s phrase for documents pulled from the public archive after they had been published. That last objective tracks a separate finding by CBS News, which reported on March 3 that the department had removed roughly 47,000 files and 65,500 pages from the official Epstein Library website in the weeks after the largest single release.
The statute is Public Law 119–38, originating as H.R. 4405, introduced by Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Representative Ro Khanna of California. The House passed the bill on November 18, 2025 by a vote of 427 to 1; the Senate cleared it by unanimous consent the following day; the President signed it the same day. The compliance deadline written into the text was 30 days from enactment, or December 19, 2025. Section 4 of the Act enumerates the narrow categories of material the Attorney General is permitted to withhold or redact: victim personally identifying information, child sexual abuse material, depictions of death or serious physical injury, properly classified national-defense information, and material whose release would jeopardize an active federal investigation. The same section bars redaction on the basis of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity” to government officials or other public figures, and requires every redaction to be accompanied by a written legal justification published in the Federal Register. Section 5 requires the Attorney General to submit to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, within 15 days of the final release, an unredacted list of every government official and politically exposed person named in the released material.
What the department released, and when
The department’s public position is that it has complied with the statute. The disclosure record, drawn from the Justice Department’s Epstein Library landing page, lists six release events between December 19, 2025 and March 5, 2026. The first, on the statutory deadline, included a small partial production. A second release on December 22 drew immediate criticism after press and survivor-advocate review found pages where redaction bars were applied as image overlays and could be removed in a standard PDF viewer, and 552 pages where the entire body of the document had been blacked out without the written justification the statute requires. The third and largest release, on January 30, 2026, was announced by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in a Department press release titled “Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” The release added more than three million pages, more than 2,000 videos, and roughly 180,000 still images to the public archive. Mr. Blanche’s statement that day described the department as having “collected approximately six million pages” of responsive material in total, with the balance withheld under one of the Act’s enumerated exceptions, principally victim privacy and active-investigation jeopardy. Three further releases followed in February and on March 5.
The disparity between the six-million-page figure stated by the department and the 3.5-million-page figure that appears in the public archive is the central numerical question the audit is expected to address. Under the Act, the department bears the burden of producing the written legal justification, published in the Federal Register, for each redaction or withholding. As of publication, the Federal Register record contains a single omnibus filing from the Office of the Attorney General dated February 4, 2026, citing victim-privacy and active-investigation grounds for an unspecified portion of the withheld pages. No subsequent Federal Register filing has accounted for the remaining withholdings or for the post-release removals.
The 65,500 pages CBS News could not find
On March 3, CBS News published a page-by-page comparison of the Epstein Library archive across successive snapshots taken between January 30 and the end of February. The analysis found that the department had quietly removed 47,000 individual files, totaling roughly 65,500 pages, from the public-facing archive in the weeks after the January 30 release. The removals were not announced on the Department’s press page, were not accompanied by Federal Register notices, and were not, on the date CBS first reported them, reflected in the running page-count totals displayed on the Epstein Library landing page. Mr. Blanche, in remarks to reporters on March 4, characterized the removed files as containing “sporadic errors” in redaction that, on review, had to be corrected and re-uploaded; he said the department had moved quickly to address the errors. CBS reported on the same day that the running total of public pages had fallen to approximately 2.7 million.
The OIG audit, in its third preliminary objective, will examine the department’s process for these post-release removals: under what standard the department determined a published page required removal, who at the department made the determination, whether a re-redacted version was subsequently re-uploaded, and whether the running totals on the public landing page were updated to reflect the removal. The audit notice does not commit to a release date for the final report, citing the Inspector General Act of 1978’s provision that completed work will be published in due course.
Outside pressure on the same questions
The law requires disclosure of all records that relate to Epstein and Maxwell. DOJ leadership has yet to fulfill that simple requirement. — Virginia Canter, ethics director, Democracy Defenders Fund, statement on the Justice Department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, February 6, 2026
The audit was preceded by formal complaints from three quarters: Epstein survivors and a group of congressional Democrats sent a letter in December 2025 to the OIG asking the office to determine whether records had been tampered with prior to release; Representatives Massie and Khanna, the bill’s sponsors, asked a federal judge in February to appoint an independent special master to oversee the release process, a request the court denied; and the Democracy Defenders Fund, an ethics nonprofit, issued a February 6 statement asserting that the department had narrowed its document search to a subset of formal case files and had thereby excluded categories the statute expressly required, among them internal Justice Department communications referencing third parties and records concerning the destruction or alteration of evidence. The DDF statement, signed by ethics director Virginia Canter, said the January 30 release contained, in DDF’s review, “barely a handful” of email communications from senior department officials, including the current Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose communications would, on the statute’s text, fall squarely within the categories Congress required.
The Department has not publicly responded to the DDF analysis on its merits. In a March 4 statement, an unnamed Department spokesperson said the agency had “complied with the law” and was continuing to withhold an unspecified number of pages under the Act’s active-investigation and victim-privacy exceptions. The Office of the Attorney General did not respond to a request from The Moxley Press, sent on May 5, for a per-category accounting of the withheld pages or a copy of the February 4 Federal Register justification’s underlying review log.
What the audit can and cannot do
The Office of the Inspector General is a creature of the Inspector General Act of 1978. Its authority is to audit and investigate the conduct of Justice Department personnel and components; its findings have the force of recommendation, not order. It cannot compel the department to release the pages CBS News identified as missing, it cannot reverse a withholding the department has labeled as protective of an active investigation, and it cannot file suit against the Attorney General for non-compliance with a statute. What it can do is publish a public report, under the Act’s standard practice, that documents the department’s process step by step: what was collected, how it was searched, on what grounds material was withheld, and how post-release removals were handled. That report, when issued, will be the first formal account of the department’s compliance process drawn from internal records rather than press statements.
There is also a structural question the audit may surface but cannot resolve. The Inspector General position at the Department of Justice has been vacant since longtime Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz left in late 2025 to take a senior position at the Federal Reserve Board. Mr. Blier, the deputy, has performed the duties of the office in the interim. A nominee for the permanent role, career Department attorney Don Berthiaume, was forwarded to the Senate Judiciary Committee in February but has not yet been confirmed. The decisions about scope, timing, and public disclosure of the audit’s findings will, in the first instance, rest with Mr. Blier and his career staff. Whether those decisions survive a change of leadership at the office is one of the open questions of the audit’s lifecycle.
What is unresolved
Several questions are open. The Federal Register has not, to date, contained a second compliance filing accounting for the post-release removals; whether the department will file one is unknown. The Department has not produced, on its public Epstein Library page or in any subsequent press statement, a per-category accounting of the roughly 2.5 million pages it has acknowledged collecting but not released; the audit may surface that accounting. The court’s February denial of the Massie–Khanna special-master motion did not foreclose a renewed application on a different record, and the lawmakers have not stated publicly whether they intend to refile in light of the OIG audit. The 15-day post-release reporting requirement under Section 5, which would produce an unredacted list of government officials and politically exposed persons named in the released material to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, has not been publicly acknowledged by the department as having been satisfied; whether either committee has received the list, and whether the list has been further shared with members in a closed session, is not knowable from the public docket.
The Moxley Press contacted the Office of the Inspector General’s public affairs office on May 5 with three questions: the audit’s expected timeline, whether the office has obtained the department’s internal review log for the post-release removals, and whether the audit will examine the Section 5 reporting compliance. A spokesperson responded the same day, pointed to the April 23 announcement, and declined to comment further on a continuing audit. The Office of the Attorney General was contacted on May 5; no response had been received by publication. Counsel for the survivors who signed the December 2025 letter to the OIG was contacted on May 6; no response had been received by publication.
The statute, the disclosures, the removals, and the audit notice are all on the public record. What they describe, read together, is a transparency law whose central operational question is no longer whether the department will release the documents Congress required, but whether the document trail of the release itself, in the form of internal review logs, redaction guidance, and removal records, will survive the audit and reach the public report.