MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell Pounds Trump DOJ’s Epstein Files Gaffes In Blistering Rant

MS NOW host Lawrence O’Donnell hammered President Donald Trump’s Justice Department over a blizzard of missteps in their publication of the latest Epstein Files dump.

The Department of Justice released more than 3 million pages of Epstein documents on Friday, which included more than 5,300 mentions of Trump and multiple claims of sexual misconduct from various sources. Some of those were subsequently deleted.

The release was also plagued by rampant failures to redact victims’ names. and the publication of nude images of victims that the DOJ had failed to redact.

On Monday night’s edition of MS NOW’s The Last Word, O’Donnell opened the show with a blistering commentary on the failures:

O’DONNELL: Delete my name please. I’m begging you to delete my name. Those are the words of a woman who was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking and rape conspiracy when she was a teenager, when she was legally underage in the state of Florida. She is one of the survivors who has never come forward publicly. Never.

We’ve seen dozens of survivors speaking publicly outside of the Capitol last year, urging Congress to pass a law forcing the release of the Epstein files, a law that Congress passed and Donald Trump signed into law, surely expecting that his Justice Department that he controls would violate that law, as the Trump Justice Department has done. The Trump Justice Department keeps finding new ways to violate the law. They violated the deadline and the law by more than a month, and then they violated the requirement to deliver all of the Epstein files to Congress, not just a portion.

And they violated the law requiring them to redact the names of the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators, including the convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Trump controlled Justice Department redacted the names of the three co-defendants of Jeffrey Epstein in a draft federal indictment that was dropped by Alex Acosta, who then became — who was then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida and then later became Donald Trump’s secretary of labor during the first Trump administration.

The indictment that Republican U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta decided not to pursue is 56 pages long and describes the sex trafficking crimes of Jeffrey Epstein beginning in 2002. That indictment was part of the Epstein files release that we got over the weekend, last Friday.

The first page of that indictment has three redactions. And those three redactions right here on the first page of this indictment. Let me get it into the camera here. Those three redactions are the three names of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators in this draft indictment, who the indictment says were employed by Jeffrey Epstein to, quote, perform, among other things, services as personal assistants.

So, the indictment describes those co-defendants literally leading children upstairs in Jeffrey Epstein’s home for their first encounter with Jeffrey Epstein. Quote, “In or around May 2004, defendant redacted led Jane Doe number six from the kitchen at 356 El Brillo Way upstairs to the master bedroom area — at 358 El Brillo Way, in or around May 2004, defendant Jeffrey Epstein redacted Jane Doe six, who was then a 16-year-old girl.

Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator and co-defendants in this indictment, the one who led that girl upstairs to Jeffrey Epstein, is one of the people whose identity Donald Trump’s Justice Department doesn’t want you to know and was very, very careful to protect. But that same Trump Justice Department did not protect many of those girls who were led upstairs by Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal co-conspirators, including Ghislaine Maxwell.

Attorney Bradley Edwards represents hundreds of these survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and has told us on this program that only a very small number of the total number of survivors have ever come forward publicly. Bradley Edwards is now asking federal judges to intervene and force the Trump Justice Department to, as one of his clients pleads, delete my name.

In a filing to the federal judges, Bradley Edwards revealed some of the violations of the Epstein Transparency Act that the Trump Justice Department has committed.

One, documents in which minor victim one had her name revealed 20 times in a single document, after reporting the violation, Department of Justice redacted her name three additional times, leaving 17 instances still unredacted as of this filing.

Two, an email listing 32 minor child victims with only one name redacted and 31 left visible. Despite the Department of Justice’s possession of those names.

Three, FBI 302 victim statements with full first and last names unredacted, including for minor victims.

Four, handwritten FBI interview notes with minor victims. Full names unredacted at the top and throughout.

Five, documents containing victims’ names alongside dates of birth, bank information, driver’s license numbers, email addresses or home addresses.

Six, documents where victims names are redacted in some places but not others, within the same document.

Seven, documents where redactions are pencil thin, revealing the complete name and email address beneath.

Eight, documents where photographs are properly redacted in one instance and appear fully unredacted nearby.

Nine, hundreds of documents exposing the names of four women who have been in near constant communication with the Department of Justice since December, requesting protection.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department did not give them that protection. Bradley Edwards told the judges the Department of Justice cannot plausibly characterize this as error, negligence or bureaucratic failure. But that is exactly what Donald Trump’s Justice Department claimed.

Human error today, the Trump Justice Department said in a letter to the judges, quote, “The Department now has taken down several thousands of documents and media that may have inadvertently included victim identifying information due to various factors, including technical or human error.”

This is the same Trump Justice Department that, for the first time in history, raided a county office to seize voting records last week, not copies of voting records, the actual voting records.

Watch above via MS NOW’s The Last Word.

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