All 535 members of Congress now have an invitation to read the unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files — every last page of them — in a secure reading room at the Department of Justice starting Monday.
Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis confirmed the move in a letter to lawmakers:
"I am writing to confirm that the department is making unredacted versions of the more than 3 million pages of publicly released documents available for review by both houses of Congress starting Monday."
There are conditions. No electronic devices allowed. Lawmakers may take notes by hand. But the documents — all three million-plus pages — will be there, stripped of the redactions that have drawn bipartisan fire for weeks.
According to The Hill, the DOJ's public release of the Epstein files was supposed to be a transparency milestone. The Epstein Transparency Act, co-sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), required the government to hand over the files with only narrow exceptions — primarily to protect the identities of those harmed by Epstein's conduct.
That's not what happened. Of the more than six million pages the DOJ itself identified as potentially responsive, only about three million were posted. Over 200,000 pages were redacted or withheld entirely. And the redactions didn't just shield the names lawmakers expected to see blacked out. The senders of numerous lewd emails were concealed. One email exchange referenced a 9-year-old girl. Another mentioned "your littlest girl." Who wrote those messages? The public still doesn't know.
Khanna posted snapshots of the emails on X and didn't mince words:
"Concealing the reputations of these powerful men is a blatant violation of the Epstein Transparency Act we passed."
He and Massie jointly demanded a meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to ask why the senders of those emails had been redacted. That's a Republican and a Democrat asking the same question — which tells you something about how far the redactions overreached.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) pressed the DOJ in a letter last month, challenging whether the department had actually fulfilled its obligations under the law. His framing was pointed:
"Our review is particularly urgent because DOJ itself claims to have identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages, but after releasing only about half of them—including over 200,000 pages that DOJ redacted or withheld—says strangely that it has fully complied with the Act."
Raskin zeroed in on the legal standard, reminding the DOJ that the Act forbids withholding material based on embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity — including to government officials, public figures, or foreign dignitaries:
"We seek to ensure that your redactions comply with the Act's requirement that materials be withheld only in narrow circumstances, such as protecting victims' personally identifiable information, and not on the basis of 'embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.'"
That language matters. The law was written specifically to prevent the powerful from hiding behind bureaucratic discretion. If the DOJ used redaction authority to spare reputations rather than protect victims, it broke the statute it was supposed to be implementing.
The files already released revealed emails showing Epstein communicating with Elon Musk and Bill Gates. The latest tranche included several unverified claims regarding President Trump, described explicitly as unverified. No details or context accompanied those references.
But the real story isn't the names that surfaced in three million pages. It's the names somebody decided to hide in 200,000 more.
Think about what the Epstein case actually is. A network of wealthy, connected individuals exploited children, and the machinery of government, for years, failed to stop it, then failed to fully expose it. The entire purpose of the Transparency Act was to ensure the federal bureaucracy couldn't run the same playbook a third time. Yet here we are, with lawmakers having to fight for access to documents that the law already said should be public.
The DOJ's decision to open the unredacted files to Congress is the right move. Deputy AG Blanche held a press conference announcing the final tranche of documents, and now the full, unredacted record will be available for congressional review.
What lawmakers do with that access will determine whether this becomes a genuine accountability moment or another cycle of outrage that dissipates into nothing. Khanna and Massie have already shown they're willing to push. Raskin has laid out the legal framework for challenging noncompliance. The question is whether Congress treats this like oversight or theater.
No phones, no cameras — just notebooks and three million pages in a DOJ reading room. Somewhere in those documents are names that someone with redaction authority thought the American public shouldn't see. Starting Monday, at least 535 people get to find out whose names those were.
The reading room opens. The redactions come off. Now we find out who was being protected — and why.