How did the New York Times construct its 38,000‑reference count in the Epstein files?
Executive summary
The New York Times’ claim—that its review of the newly released Epstein trove turned up “more than 5,300 files containing more than 38,000 references” to President Trump, his wife, Mar‑a‑Lago and related phrases—was produced by a newsroom search of the Justice Department dump using what the paper called a “proprietary search tool,” not by an independent forensic audit of raw digital metadata or a DOJ-certified index [1]. The count is a quantitative tally of mentions across millions of pages that includes news clippings, emails, tips and other documents of varying provenance and credibility; it does not by itself establish verified misconduct and the Justice Department has said those files do not contain credible evidence to merit prosecution [1] [2].
1. How the Times described its method: a proprietary search over the released corpus
The New York Times explicitly told readers it used a “proprietary search tool” to comb the newly published Justice Department materials and that the result was “more than 5,300 files containing more than 38,000 references” to Trump and associated terms, a formulation the paper repeated in multiple stories and programs summarizing their review of the files [1] [3]. The wording indicates the count came from automated text search across the DOJ release rather than hand‑counted corroboration of every item, and the Times did not publish the tool’s rules, keyword lists, deduplication steps or thresholds for what counted as a “reference,” leaving the precise construction opaque to readers [1].
2. What the underlying corpus contained and why raw counts can balloon
The DOJ release that the Times searched totaled millions of pages, including roughly 3–3.5 million pages, 2,000 videos and some 180,000 images in the January batch, and the department has described the collection as drawn from multiple investigations, inboxes and case files—meaning many documents are press clippings, tips, unverified leads and duplicative attachments that can contain repeated names or phrases [4] [5]. The Times noted many of the documents mentioning Trump are news articles and publicly available materials that had landed in Epstein’s email inbox, and that none of those files contained direct Epstein‑Trump communications; counting every instance in those news clippings and forwarded items therefore magnifies the nominal tally [1] [6].
3. The provenance problem: tips, hearsay and compiled clippings in the files
A large share of what appears in the Epstein trove is third‑party input—FBI tips, media coverage and “salacious information” summaries—that the DOJ and reporting partners describe as unverified or hearsay, and the Times’ search would register names in those contexts the same way it registers them in primary source emails unless filters were applied [6] [7]. The Justice Department itself has cautioned that the files include unverified tips and that more than 200,000 pages were redacted or withheld for privilege or victim privacy, meaning apparent frequency counts can reflect the chaotic paperwork of an investigation rather than confirmed connections [5] [8].
4. What the number does—and doesn’t—prove, and how other actors interpreted it
The Times’ numeric finding demonstrates that references to Trump and related terms are widespread in the material made public, which is newsworthy because it shows the degree to which Epstein’s files accumulated mentions of many powerful people; it does not prove criminal conduct, and DOJ officials have said their investigative review found no credible information to justify further investigation into Trump on these allegations [1] [2]. Critics and defenders of the administration have seized on different parts of this paradox: advocates demand fuller disclosure of the unreleased pages and redactions, while others warn that automated counts can fuel misleading headlines if context and provenance aren’t made clear [9] [8] [7].
5. The limits of public verification and what remains unknown
Because the Times used an in‑house, proprietary search methodology that it has not fully disclosed, independent observers cannot reproduce the “38,000” figure from the public release alone; the paper’s account is transparent about the tool but not its inner workings, and sources reporting on the DOJ release emphasize that many responsive pages remain redacted or withheld and that some identifiers required additional review, further complicating any replication effort [1] [8] [5]. The most accurate public characterization is therefore: the Times reported an automated count of mentions across the released files using its own search system, and that count reflects mentions of variants and related phrases in a corpus that includes many unverified items rather than a vetted list of substantiated contacts [1] [7].