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Ex-federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann ripped Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s “outrageous” claim on Friday that President Donald Trump has “wanted to make all of” the Jeffrey Epstein files public for years.
“To me, this is just a huge joke that is basically treating the MAGA base as a bunch of fools,” Weissmann told MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace.
He later continued, “If [Trump] wanted to do it, he could have done it on day one of his presidency and he hasn’t.”
After taking office, Trump — who was open to releasing the Epstein files on the campaign trail — fought and ultimately caved to lawmakers’ efforts to force the DOJ to release its files on the late convicted sex offender publicly.
Earlier in the day, Blanche appeared on Fox News, where he suggested that the Justice Department would release just some of its unclassified material on Epstein on Friday despite facing a legally mandated deadline to drop all the files.
Blanche told the conservative network that he expected the DOJ to make public “several hundred thousand” documents on Epstein by Friday, with more on the way “over the next couple of weeks.”
As a result, Democrats and some Republicans have accused the department of failing to comply with the law and making heavy, unexplained redactions to hundreds of pages.
Weissmann argued that Blanche’s talk of dropping further documents in the coming weeks is an open acknowledgement that the administration is in “violation of the law.” He stressed that a “huge part” of the Epstein story is now what material the DOJ is not producing.
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