The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) stated on Sunday that President Donald Trump «has nothing to do» with the removal of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein case, including photographs of the Republican, from the declassified documents published by the U.S. government. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche specified that the official is not involved in the decision to remove more than a dozen images among the thousands of pages published on Friday about the late magnate. Blanche said they responded to requests from victim organizations. «After publishing the photographs, we became aware of concerns about (the identity of) those women and the fact that we had published the photos, so we removed them. It has nothing to do with President Trump,» he said. «In this way, we are complying with the law, which, by the way, is what President Trump has been asking us to do since before he was elected. There is nothing for him to hide in the Epstein files,» he indicated. Blanche also warned that the reason the DOJ is still reviewing the documents and has spaced out their publication instead of releasing them all at once on Friday, as stipulated, is «simply to protect the victims.» Several senators and congressmen, including Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, stated that their party «will investigate this violation of the law and ensure that the American people know about it.» «Dozens of photographs of President Trump with Mr. Epstein have already been published,» he specified to NBC. Blanche added that «the idea that a single photo was removed because it showed President Trump is absurd.» Among the documents removed on Saturday was an image of a desk with framed photographs of personalities with Epstein, —a known financier with privileged access to key figures—, where one could also see that in an open drawer there were several photos of Trump with women in bathing suits, reported NBC. The other images that would have been removed include sexually explicit works of art, photographs of mailboxes full of envelopes, and a page from a notebook with names and numbers.
