The Department of Justice (DOJ) appears to have pulled a photo containing images of President Donald Trump from the thousands of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein it released Friday.
Amid the trove of documents was a photo of a desk with an open drawer. In the drawer were multiple photos of Trump, including one of him with young women and another of him and his wife, first lady Melania Trump.
By Saturday morning, the photo of the desk drawer, which was labeled “EFTA00000468” in the DOJ’s numerically organized Epstein library, was no longer available.
The department’s library also jumped entries, from “EFTA00000467” to “EFTA00000469” — strongly indicating that “EFTA00000468” was removed.
The photo of the open desk drawer, however, was still available on open-source, public collections of the DOJ’s library, which were created shortly after the department released its initial batch of documents Friday afternoon.
The missing photo adds to the mounting inconsistencies in the DOJ’s release of all the materials it had gathered over the past two decades through investigations into Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women and underage girls.
Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York prison in 2019, was a longtime associate of Trump’s.
While Trump has acknowledged his past friendship with Epstein, he denied involvement in or knowledge of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation and claimed they had a falling out in the mid-2000s.
However, the president, his former attorneys in the DOJ and his allies in Congress have also repeatedly attempted to prevent the release of the Epstein files.
Emails from Epstein’s estate released by the House Oversight Committee last month also indicated that the convicted sex offender believed Trump knew of his abuses.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, one of Trump’s former defense attorneys, was required by a new law to turn over for public scrutiny all of the department’s Epstein-related documents by Friday. However, she failed to do so.
Before the deadline, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, another one of Trump’s former attorneys, said the department would deliver only a fraction of its Epstein documents, claiming that it needed to hold material past the deadline to redact the files in order to protect victims.
However, the new law, which Congress passed and Trump signed last month, had already given the department 30 days to process the material. The FBI had also started an extensive review and redaction process on the documents in March.
Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the co-sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, slammed Bondi for withholding information past the deadline.
In a video statement, Khanna said he and Massie were exploring bringing impeachment charges against DOJ officials responsible for the incomplete release.
This story has been updated with additional information throughout.
