The Justice Department has begun the process of restoring tens of thousands of records tied to the federal investigation into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein after officials acknowledged errors in their review and explained why a large batch of documents had been temporarily removed from the public archive.
A senior DOJ official said 47,635 files were taken offline for review from a larger batch of roughly 60,000 pages that the department pulled due to sensitive content that needed redactions.
The official said the batch was taken down after researchers and members of the public flagged instances of unredacted nudity, including some material that appeared to contain commercial pornography, prompting the department to remove the files and conduct another round of redactions before restoring them.
DOJ officials have said the large batch of files was never intended to be deleted permanently and would be reposted once the review process is complete.
The records are part of the massive archive released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the government to disclose most investigative materials tied to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
