On April 27, 2026, lawyer and political commentator Katie Phang filed suit against Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleging that the Justice Department is in 'brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation' of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Congress passed in November 2025.
The statute required the Department of Justice to release the Epstein records within 30 days of enactment. That deadline passed in December. As of late April, of the approximately 6 million pages DOJ has reviewed, only about 3.5 million have been released. Phang seeks the appointment of a court expert to ensure DOJ compliance with the statutory mandate.
The Epstein file question has been a defining controversy of Trump's second term. The administration has cycled through multiple positions: a January 2026 promise of full release, AG Pam Bondi's 'phase one' release in March that contained no new material, Bondi being subpoenaed and ultimately fired over the failure, AG Todd Blanche's 'we have released everything' statement on Fox News in early April, and the WSJ-published Epstein birthday letter that prompted Trump's now-dismissed $10 billion defamation lawsuit. Phang's complaint frames the cover-up not as a partisan grievance but as a violation of an act of Congress.
Blanche's public statement: 'We have released everything. We reviewed six million pieces of paper... we are not sitting on a single piece of paper.' The arithmetic does not match: 6 million reviewed minus 3.5 million released equals 2.5 million pages still in DOJ possession. Phang's filing asks the court to compel DOJ to either release the remaining material or specifically identify, document by document, any statutory exemption it claims.
By July 2026 the case had teeth. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered Blanche in June to release previously redacted Epstein materials by July 2, including FBI interview notes and email exchanges; the materials include notes from FBI interviews with a woman alleging Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, and emails discussing a “torture video” and Epstein's potential co-conspirators. Blanche blew the deadline. Phang proposed a $1,000-a-day fine until he complies, and on July 21 Blanche filed a plea against “punitive sanctions,” calling her argument “outlandish” and “absurd” and her suit “sensational and unsubstantiated.” An acting attorney general begging off a contempt-adjacent daily fine, over files a federal judge already ordered released, is where the transparency-act fight now stands (see A Federal Judge Rules the DOJ Has 'Conceded' It Is Violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Giving It a Week to Unredact or Explain and Epstein Survivors Film a PSA Against Blanche's Attorney General Nomination as the NYC Bar Calls Him 'Unfit').
Update (September 18, 2026): Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled on September 16 in a 20-page opinion, and the result was split. He discharged the order to show cause as to seven documents after reviewing them privately and satisfying himself the redactions covered victim names, private email addresses and law-enforcement personnel. He ruled against the department on two points. He rejected its claim that handwritten FBI interview notes could be withheld as duplicative of the typed reports drawn from them: “The Court rejects Defendant's assertion that the underlying handwritten FBI notes that formed the basis for certain FD-302 reports were properly withheld because they are 'substantially similar to' and therefore duplicative of the typewritten reports.” He also rejected the refusal to review foreign-language material, writing, “Defendant cites no authority for the proposition that administrative inconvenience excuses him from meeting his statutory obligations.”
On contempt, Sullivan stopped short: “However, Defendant has now stated his rationale for not initiating the review, and so a civil contempt finding at this juncture would be premature.”
What he ordered by September 24 at 11:00 a.m. was narrower than much of the coverage suggested. The handwritten notes behind four interview reports are to be submitted to the court for in camera review in both redacted and unredacted form, not released to the public. The department was also told to substantiate three remaining redactions and to begin reviewing and producing foreign-language material, and given until September 21 to seek clarification if the order was not “clear and unambiguous.”
A companion opinion the same day granted Phang's motion to compel an answer. The department had never responded to the complaint at all: “Defendant's deadline to respond to the Complaint was June 26, 2026... Defendant did not file a response... Nor did he move for an extension of time to file a response prior to the deadline.”
The department appealed to the D.C. Circuit the next day.
One passage from the department's earlier filings is worth recording on its own. In its July 2 response to the show-cause order, signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, it explained its redaction policy this way: “Consistent with that statutory authority, the Department has sought to prevent victim PII from becoming public even in instances where the victims eventually became complicit or engaged in reprehensible activity or communications.”