Top Federal Prosecutors ‘crushed’ By Epstein Files Workload

The premier federal prosecutors’ office in the country is consumed by the task of reviewing files related to Jeffrey Epstein, according to four people familiar with the matter and internal memos obtained by POLITICO.

Virtually every prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who isn’t handling an imminent or ongoing trial — including some who are working on other major cases — has been tasked with helping to review more than two million files to redact information about Epstein’s sex-trafficking victims. Even the high-ranking executive staff and unit chiefs are poring over the documents, often working weekends.

Prosecutors are being “crushed by the work,” said one person familiar with the matter, who, like others quoted in this article, was granted anonymity to discuss internal processes. And while people in the office hope the task will take no longer than a few more weeks, no one is really sure when it will be completed.

The scale of the review has raised questions about whether the task is stretching prosecutors too thin and pushing other work to the back burner in an office that regularly handles some of the country’s most important white-collar, terrorism and financial crimes cases.

Even several of the prosecutors working on the narco-terrorism and drug trafficking case against deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, perhaps the most prominent prosecution in the justice system at the moment, are also assigned to work on the Epstein documents, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Some prosecutors tasked with the Epstein review have weighed asking for extensions on deadlines in their other work, according to another person familiar with the matter.

A spokesperson for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

Justice Department officials have described the scope of the work in recent court filings, although the burden on the Manhattan office appears to be even more significant than some of those descriptions suggest. In a filing earlier this month, Jay Clayton, the top federal prosecutor in the office, told a federal judge that “over 125 lawyers in the Southern District of New York,” which employs about 200 assistant U.S. attorneys, were working on the effort.

Many lawyers assigned to the task were expected to spend “the next few weeks” dedicating “all or a substantial portion of their workday” to reviewing and redacting files, Clayton wrote. In an update last week, he disclosed that more than 500 people across the Justice Department — including attorneys at the department’s headquarters and in the Southern District of Florida — have been reviewing the files.

The scope of the work in Manhattan stems at least in part from the fact that the office handled both the sex trafficking case against Epstein and the successful prosecution of his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

The massive Epstein undertaking began several days before the Dec. 19 deadline by which the government was legally obligated to begin disclosing the files. Karl Metzner, the office’s Associate U.S. Attorney, who supervises the Victim/Witness Unit and Privilege Review team, suggested to prosecutors in a memo that the initial marching orders were unclear. “This obviously raises a whole bunch of questions, which we don’t have all the answers to at the moment,” he wrote.

A follow-up memo from another official notified staff that “we (as in, every AUSA in the Office) will soon be asked to take on redactions of discovery materials in connection with the Epstein files.”

The note continued: “We appreciate that this is unexpected and may be disruptive as people wind down their work for the remainder of the year. All we can do is try to gather as much information as we can, and help you balance this ask with all the other competing deadlines you are juggling.”

A third memo that appears to have been sent the day before the deadline read: “We expect to ask that each AUSA (chiefs, deputy chiefs, executive staff included) complete a batch of approximately 75 documents to certify by the end of today.”

“At bottom, we are being entrusted to protect victim information,” it said. “While the timing of this review is challenging for many reasons (including that you are all very busy), this is an important task, and we owe it to the victims to do it right.”

Though the Justice Department released multiple tranches of Epstein material in late December, it hasn’t published any additional documents since then. On Dec. 31, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote that “DOJ lawyers from Main Justice, FBI, SDFL, and SDNY are working around the clock through the holidays, including Christmas and New Years, to review documents in compliance with federal law.”

The effort, Blanche wrote, is “truly is an all-hands-on-deck approach and we're asking as many lawyers as possible to commit their time to review the documents that remain. Required redactions to protect victims take time but they will not stop these materials from being released.”

It is unclear, however, when additional material will be released, and Clayton’s recent disclosures haven’t provided any guidance on timing.

The burdens on prosecutors spilled into public view last week in one of the Manhattan office’s highest-profile cases. A defense attorney for one of a trio of wealthy, jet-setting brothers facing trial this week for an alleged sex trafficking conspiracy suggested the office’s production of evidence to the defense has been delayed by the Epstein review.

“They have half of the U.S. attorney’s office on the Epstein files,” Teny Geragos, an attorney for Oren Alexander, complained. “We have a trial starting next week, your honor.”

While U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni acknowledged that the prosecutors working on the Alexander brothers’ case aren’t themselves tasked with Epstein review, she suggested perhaps others in the office could be freed up to assist them.

“I do take the defense’s point that perhaps a few people could be sprung from Epstein obligations to deal with Alexander obligations,” the judge said. “Given the facts that these people are on trial, and Epstein is dead.”