Did the Department of Justice under President Biden have access to Jeffrey Epstein case files during his term?
Executive summary
The Department of Justice (DOJ) possessed and maintained the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files throughout the Biden administration, and those files were part of an active, ongoing federal review during that period; the DOJ later produced and released millions of pages under a subsequent statutory and administrative process (DOJ statements and reporting) [1] [2] [3]. Public disclosures and news reporting show the files were not newly created by the later administration but were held by federal prosecutors and investigators while the matter remained under investigation and appeal in the Biden years [2] [4].
1. The basic fact: the federal government — including DOJ — retained Epstein materials during Biden’s term
The DOJ and FBI had custody of investigative materials gathered over years of probes into Epstein and associates, and reporting states the matter remained an open criminal investigation through parts of the Biden presidency, with victims continuing to provide information to federal investigators during that time [2] [4]. The Department later compiled and posted a public repository of Epstein-related records on the DOJ website, reflecting records already in agency custody [5] [6].
2. Why some commentators said records weren’t “released” under Biden — legal and practical constraints
Multiple accounts explain that files were not published wholesale during the Biden administration because the investigations included live grand jury material, ongoing appeals, victim privacy concerns and the need for careful redactions — standard legal limits on publicizing active case files [2] [1]. Reporters and DOJ officials noted that releasing unredacted records while matters were still subject to legal process or to protect victims would have been inappropriate or unlawful, which helps explain why a public dump did not occur earlier [2] [1].
3. The later release: statutory mandate, review and publication under a different administration
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the DOJ, under a later Attorney General, undertook a multi-stage identification and review process that resulted in the publication of millions of pages and accompanying media; the department said releases complied with that law after redaction for victims and other protected materials [3] [1] [4]. News outlets reported that the DOJ uploaded multiple large datasets and that the releases included millions of pages, images and videos collected from prior FBI and prosecutorial investigations [7] [1].
4. Political claims versus what the documentary record shows
Politicians and allies of different administrations framed the timing of public disclosure as evidence of concealment or deliberate withholding by predecessors, but contemporaneous reporting and DOJ statements emphasize that the materials were already federal evidence and that legal constraints — not simply administrative choice — governed release timing [2] [1]. Oversight and survivor groups, however, criticized the later DOJ releases as incomplete and argued that not all responsive records were made public, saying the department identified more potentially responsive pages than it released after review and redaction [8] [4].
5. What reporting cannot prove from the provided sources
The assembled sources document possession of the files by the federal government during Biden’s term and the legal rationale for not publicly releasing raw case materials, but they do not provide an itemized, day-by-day custody log showing which individual DOJ offices or officials accessed specific documents while Biden was in office; those granular chain-of-custody details are not available in the cited reporting [5] [1]. Consequently, claims that the files were “withheld” for partisan reasons are contested in the public record and depend on interpretation of legal constraints versus political intent [2] [8].