Epstein files: Trump, Howard Lutnick, Steve Tisch among prominent names that appear in latest Justice Department release

The Justice Department on Friday released many more records from its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, resuming disclosures under a law intended to reveal what the government knew about the millionaire financier’s sexual abuse of young girls and his interactions with the rich and powerful.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department was releasing more than 3 million pages of documents in the latest Epstein disclosure, as well as more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The files, posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release of documents in December.

Congressional Democrats, who have been key to pushing for the release of case files on Epstein, are arguing that Friday’s release is only about half of the files that have been collected.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act, a law enacted after months of public and political pressure, requires the government to open its files on the convicted sex offender as well as his confidant and onetime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein killed himself in a New York jail cell in August 2019, a month after he was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.

Here’s the latest:

Epstein appears to have tried to connect the co-owner of the New York Giants with women Steve Tisch, the co-owner of the football team, emailed back and forth with Epstein several times in 2013, and in some they referenced women.

In one exchange, Tisch wrote to Epstein that he had lunch with one of Epstein’s assistant’s friends — “very sweet girl” — and asked if the financier knew anything about her.

“no, but i will ask,” said Epstein, before inquiring if Tisch had contacted another woman, crudely describing her physical features.

In another email exchange, Tisch asked Epstein, “Is there somebody in NY you want me to meet?” Epstein’s reply was redacted, but in a later email he said “tahitian speaks mostly french, exotic.”

“Working girl?” asked Tisch in a response similar to characterizations the two appeared to use in describing women, including in one email where Tisch asks “pro or civilian?”

“I am happy to have you as a new but obviosly shared interest friend,” wrote Epstein.

In an emailed statement, Tisch said that he had a “brief association” where they emailed about “adult women” and other topics, saying that he never took Epstein up on invitations or visited his island.

“As we all know now, he was a terrible person and someone I deeply regret associating with,” said Tisch.

That was after multiple underage girls came forward and told police and FBI agents that they had been paid to give him sexualized massages.

Ultimately, the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time, Alexander Acosta, signed off on a deal that let Epstein avoid federal prosecution. He pleaded guilty instead to a state charge of soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18 and got an 18-month jail sentence.

One of the documents released Friday, though, was a draft indictment from that period that would have brought federal charges against not just Epstein but three other people who worked for him as personal assistants. The names of those people were blacked out in the Justice Department’s records.

The draft indictment said those people were part of a conspiracy to recruit underage girls to perform lewd acts with Epstein, summon them to his house by phone, and then to pay them for their services.

They included emails in which Epstein and others shared news articles about President Donald Trump, commented on his policies or his politics, or gossiped about him and his family.

Among the records was a spreadsheet, created just last August, summarizing calls that had been made to the FBI’s National Threat Operation Center or to a hotline set by prosecutors from people claiming to have some knowledge of wrongdoing by Trump.

That document included a range of uncorroborated stories involving many different celebrities, and somewhat fantastical scenarios, occasionally with notations indicating what follow-up, if any, was done by agents.

Among the documents released Friday was a 58-page manual that dictated staff etiquette and duties in his Florida mansion, ranging from how to interact with Epstein and Maxwell to what to stock in their bathrooms.

“Remember that you see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, except to answer a question directed at you. Respect their privacy,” the manual says.

Staff were banned from addressing Epstein, Maxwell and their guests with their hands in their pockets, and from saying “yeah,” “sure,” “no problem,” “you bet,” “gotcha,” “right” and “I dunno.” They also could not talk about the weather or any other subject unless asked.

As part of the “pre-arrival preparations” for the primary bedroom, the air conditioning had to be set at 60 F (15.5 C), a gun was to be placed in a bedside table draw and tissue boxes could not be less than one-third full. Toothpaste containers in the bathrooms could not be less than one-half full.

Every car had to have two bottles of water and $100 in the glove compartment, and the gas tanks had to be at least three-quarters full.

Excerpts of the manual were introduced during Maxwell’s trial in 2021 as a former employee of Epstein’s Florida mansion testified.

The employee at Epstein’s Florida estate, whose name was redacted, told the FBI his duties included fanning $100 bills on a table near Epstein’s bed, placing a gun between the mattresses in his bedroom and cleaning up after Epstein’s frequent massages, which often involved rubdowns from young women or girls.

The employee recalled wiping down vibrators used during massages, throwing out tissues, laundering towels and seeing used condoms on more than one occasion. He said he did not go into Epstein’s massage room while he was receiving massages and did not witness any sexual activity between the females and Epstein.

FBI agents wrote that the employee told them Epstein also “enjoyed getting ice cream from a local ice cream parlor with the girls,” allowed “some of the girls to drive one of his vehicles,” and sometimes directed the employee to take them shopping at a local mall.

An employee at Epstein’s Florida estate told the FBI in 2007 that he believed he saw underage girls in the financier’s company and that Epstein once had him purchase flowers and deliver them to a student at Royal Palm Beach High School to commemorate her performance in the school play.

He said Epstein also directed him to rent a car for the girl, described by FBI agents as a “UF,” or “Unidentified Female.” The employee recalled another female person whom he said “looked very young.”

Asked by an FBI agent if he believed some of the girls were under the age of 18, the employee nodded his head, “affirming that he believed some of the girls were under the age of eighteen,” according to notes from the interview.

The FBI had started investigating Epstein in July 2006 and FBI agents expected Epstein to be indicted in May 2007, according to records released Friday. But the probe was ultimately abandoned in a deal that allowed him to plea guilty to state charges and avoid significant punishment.

In a letter to Congress, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche noted that tens of thousands of files had been redacted or withheld due to legal privileges such as protecting attorney-client work communications.

The letter obtained by The Associated Press said that the Justice Department within 15 days of Friday’s release will submit to Congress a “formal report with a summary of redactions made and a list of all government officials and politically exposed persons named or referenced in the released materials.”

Blanche said the department “remains committed to protecting the privacy of victims and welcome continued engagement from victims and their counsel.” He said officials have created an email inbox for victims to contact authorities if they need to raise concerns about redactions.

The group of survivors and their relatives said the massive cache of files released Friday protects the names of their abusers at their expense.

“This latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files is being sold as transparency, but what it actually does is expose survivors,” reads the statement provided by the publicist of the late Virginia Giuffre, one of the most vocal Epstein accusers. “As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy.”

The group dismissed the notion that Friday’s release represented all the documents that should be legally made public.

“This is not over. We will not stop until the truth is fully revealed and every perpetrator is finally held accountable,” the statement reads.

On one occasion in December 2012, Epstein invited Lutnick to his private island in the Caribbean for lunch, according to documents released on Friday show. Lutnick’s wife, Allison Lutnick, enthusiastically accepted the invitation and said they would arrive on a yacht with their children. On another occasion in 2011, the two men had drinks, according to a schedule shared with Epstein.

Lutnick has tried to distance himself from associations with Epstein, saying in a 2025 interview that he cut ties with the sex offender decades ago, calling him “gross.”

The two men’s lives continued to intersect as recently as 2018, documents show. That year, Epstein contributed to a philanthropic dinner honoring Lutnick, according to email exchanges. The year prior, the two men sent each other emails about the construction of a building across the street from both of their homes.

Lutnick didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Friday afternoon.

‘The documents contain hundreds of friendly text messages between Epstein and Steve Bannon in the months leading up to Epstein’s suicide in August 2019. Bannon, a conservative activist who had served as Trump’s White House strategist earlier in the president’s first term, bantered over politics with the financier, discussed get-togethers with him over breakfast, lunch or dinner and, on March 29, 2019, asked Epstein if he could supply his plane to pick him up in Rome: “Is it possible to get your plane here to collect me?”

Epstein told him his pilot and crew “are doing their best” to arrange that flight but if Bannon could find a charter flight instead, “I’m happy to pay.”

Apparently in France at the time, Epstein followed up with a text saying: “My guys can pick you up. Come for dinner.” The exchange did not show how that played out. In their communications over months, the two at times touched on a documentary that Bannon was said to be planning to polish Epstein’s sullied reputation.

On June 28, 2019, Epstein messaged Bannon: “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.” The context is not discernible from that exchange. Bannon responded: “Dangerous.”

On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges. He was found dead in his cell just over a month later.

The billionaire Tesla founder reached out to Epstein on at least two separate occasions to plan visits to the Caribbean island where many of the allegations of sexual abuse purportedly occurred, according to email chains included in Friday’s document release.

In a late November 2012 exchange, Epstein inquired how many people Musk would like flown by helicopter to the island he owned — Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“Probably just Talulah and me,” Musk responded, referencing his partner at the time, actress Talulah Riley. “What day/night will be the wildest party on =our island?”

Musk messaged Epstein again ahead of a planned trip to the Caribbean in late December 2013. “Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays,” he wrote. “Is there a good time to visit?”

Epstein responded by extending an invite for sometime after the New Year holiday.

“play it by ear if you want,” he wrote. “always space for you.”

“I will come and get you,” Epstein wrote in a follow up email.

It’s not immediately clear if the island visits took place.

Spokespersons for Musk’s companies, Tesla and X, didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment Friday. Musk has maintained that he repeatedly turned down the disgraced financier’s overtures.

“Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED,” he posted on X in 2025 when House Democrats released an Epstein calendar with an entry mentioning a potential Musk visit to the island.

Epstein gave millions of dollars to research projects associated with Martin Nowak, a Harvard University math professor. In a 2018 email, Epstein assistant Lesley Groff asked someone about a missing key card for Nowak’s office.

“We can’t find it. … it is kept in my office drawer and it is not there…do you happen to know where it is?” Groff asked. The email recipient is redacted.

In 2021, Harvard barred Nowak from starting new research or advising students for at least two years because of his ties to Epstein after the financier’s 2008 sex crimes conviction. An investigation determined that Nowak gave Epstein an office in his campus research center, along with a building key card.

At the time, Nowak said he regretted the connection between Harvard and Epstein “and the hurt that it has caused.”

Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in July 2019, and found dead in his cell just over a month later.

The latest batch of documents includes emails between investigators about Epstein’s death, including an investigator’s observation that his final communication doesn’t look like a suicide note. Multiple investigations have determined that Epstein’s death was a suicide.

To draw attention away from the “large news media presence” outside the jail after Epstein’s death became known, officials concocted a plan.

According to an Aug. 16, 2019, memo, a jail supervisor told FBI agents that several employees had “used boxes and sheets to create what appeared to be a human body.” That was loaded into a white van labeled as belonging to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and media members followed when it left the jail.

But Epstein’s actual body, according to the interview notes, was loaded into a black vehicle, which departed “unnoticed.”

As with many of the documents released Friday, names were blacked out, so the identities of the jail employees were not visible.

The files also include correspondence between the Justice Department and officials at the U.S. embassy in London, which acted as a go-between with officials in the United Kingdom.

In August 2021, a Justice Department attaché at the embassy emailed the prosecutors, expressing concern about a news article that said Andrew’s refusal to speak with Epstein investigators was “straining relations” between the U.S. and the U.K.

The attache, whose name was redacted, wrote: “The Ambassador is concerned about the attached story, and I wanted to see if you have any sense of where this is coming from. Is this coming from victims’ counsel? Anyone in your shop decided to push this?”

The attache also said that a British counterpart had reached out to ask whether a civil lawsuit naming Andrew as a defendant meant the now-former prince was “now a suspect instead of a witness (in British parlance)” in a criminal investigation. The attaché said he would respond that the lawsuit had no impact on Andrew’s status.

Some of the records also document an attempt by prosecutors in New York to get Mountbatten-Windsor to agree to be interviewed as part of their Epstein sex trafficking probe.

The records include a diplomatic memo, sent to officials in the United Kingdom in April of 2020 where the FBI and prosecutors asked to interview the then-prince under oath. That interview would never take place. Lawyers for Mountbatten-Windsor declined to make him available for questions.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Britain’s Prince Andrew, was friends with Epstein for years and settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s alleged victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Giuffre claimed that she’d been directed by Epstein to have three different sexual encounters with Mountbatten-Windsor, starting when she was 17.

Mountbatten-Windsor denied her allegations.

The former prince’s name appears at least several hundred times in the documents, sometimes in news clippings, sometimes in Epstein’s private email correspondence and in guest lists for dinners organized by Epstein.

At least one of the files appears to show personal information that was meant to be kept from the public.

It’s an email exchange that appears to be marked for redactions but leaves names and telephone numbers visible. The December 2019 emails captured officials discussing missing surveillance video from the New York jail where Epstein survived an apparent suicide attempt earlier that year.

During Trump’s first term, Epstein emailed Kathy Ruemmler, a lawyer and former Obama White House official, to warn that Democrats should stop demonizing Trump as a Mafia-type figure even as he derided the president as a “maniac.”

“you might want to tell your dem friends that treatin= trump like a mafia don , ignores the fact that he has great dangerous pow.r..” Epstein wrote in a typo-filled email. “tightening the noose too slowly, risks a very bad =ituation.. gambino was never the commander in chief.”

In a 2018 exchange, Epstein and Trump advisor Steve Bannon discussed the president’s threats to oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whom he had named to the post just the year prior.

“should have been done months ago too old!!!!” Epstein wrote.

“Can u get rid of Powell or really get rid of mnuchin,” Bannon replied, referring to then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

“no, mnuchin is ok,” Epstein replied.

Trump on Friday named Kevin Warsh to succeed Powell after spending the past year assailing him for not cutting interest rates quickly enough.

Others center around Ghislaine Maxwell’s incarceration and her grievances related to her imprisonment conditions.

The records contain emails between investigators that discuss Epstein’s death, including his last note — with the email stating that it does not appear to be a suicide note.

Thousands of pages of documents related to Epstein’s jail suicide have already been released.

The House Oversight Committee has also issued a separate subpoena to Attorney General Pam Bondi for the files without redactions, but that has not been fulfilled. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the oversight panel, called the limited release of documents “outrageous and incredibly concerning.”

Congressional Democrats who have been key to pushing for the release of case files on Epstein are arguing that Friday’s release by the Department of Justice is only about half of the files that have been collected.

“The DOJ said it identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages but is releasing only about 3.5 million after review and redactions. This raises questions as to why the rest are being withheld,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who sponsored the bill that mandated the disclosure.

Khanna said he was looking to see whether the files released Friday included FBI interviews with victims, a draft indictment and information prosecutors collected during a 2007 investigation into Epstein in Florida.

The House Oversight Committee has also issued a separate subpoena to Attorney General Pam Bondi for the files without redactions, but that has not been fulfilled.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the oversight panel, called the limited release of documents “outrageous and incredibly concerning.”

Over the years, prosecutors received tips from people with wild stories about being sexually abused by famous figures. In some instances, FBI investigators diligently reached out to these tipsters and alleged victims and listened to their implausible sounding stories — some involving the occult and human sacrifice — then wrote dry reports summarizing what the people had to say and sent them to their superiors.

Attorney Jay Clayton told New York federal court judges overseeing records in the sex trafficking cases against Epstein and Maxwell that some documents are being withheld temporarily while the government awaits further guidance from civil and criminal courts.

In a letter to the judges, Clayton says his office continues to engage with victims and their lawyers, including during a call Thursday. He said the Justice Department has invited victims to reach out if they believe anything has been published that should be redacted.

The huge cache of documents included email correspondence between prosecutors, printouts of thousands of emails that Epstein either sent or received, news clippings, and reports written by FBI agents summarizing their interviews with witnesses and alleged victims in the investigation.

As was the case with many previous releases of documents related to Epstein, much material was blacked out. Some of the reports on FBI interviews had entire pages blacked out, along with the name of the person who was being interviewed.

The deputy U.S. attorney general also responded to criticism about the Justice Department’s handling of the files’ release.

He said federal attorneys had to review all 6 million pages to ensure no victim information is released, and couldn’t do so within the 30-day timeline set by the law. He noted various exemptions under the law, but said no material was being withheld under a national security or foreign policy exemption.

“There’s not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding,” he said about redactions in the files.

Justice Department lawyers made extensive redactions to the released files, including victim information that included their medical files.

They redacted images and videos, including removing any woman depicted in videos except for Ghislaine Maxwell.

Lawyers also withheld child sex abuse materials or anything depicting images of death, physical abuse or injury, as well as anything that would hurt an ongoing federal investigation, Blanche said.

Compiling accurate and thorough information takes time. A team of AP reporters is working to confirm information released by the Justice Department regarding Jeffrey Epstein.

These standards guide our reporting process:

1. We generally do not identify those who say they have been sexually assaulted or subjected to extreme abuse

2. We must make significant efforts to reach anyone who may be portrayed in a negative way in our content

3. We will not knowingly introduce rumor or false information into material

4. We abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions

5. We always strive to identify all the sources of our information

Blanche said that the release may not answer all the questions people have about Epstein or the handling of the allegations against him.

“There’s a hunger, or a thirst, for information that I don’t think will be satisfied by review of these documents,” he said.

“We did not protect President Trump. We didn’t protect — or not protect — anybody,” Blanche said.