Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Tuesday revealed that he searched for any and all mention of President Donald Trump across unredacted versions of the Jeffrey Epstein files provided to him earlier this week, and said his name “appears more than a million times.”
“I mean, there’s tons of redacted stuff,” Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told Axios in an interview published Tuesday, adding: “And [Trump’s] name, I think I put his name, and it appears more than a million times. So it’s all over the place.”
Trump has long tried to distance himself from Epstein, the late child sex offender who died behind bars of an apparent suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, but ultimately signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law in November.
Members of the House Judiciary Committee were given access to unredacted versions on Monday, when Raskin said he came away deeply troubled by his initial review and that the Justice Department appeared to be in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
A provision notably prohibits the DOJ from redacting the names of Epstein’s accomplices. The department now faces a deadline to justify its redactions to members of Congress in writing.
Raskin clarified his comments Tuesday about Trump and the unredacted documents in a statement to Axios later that day, explaining: “In the database, I typed in the words ‘Trump,’ ‘Donald or Don’ and it came up with more than a million results.”
He added, “I obviously didn’t have the time to review each one, and I obviously cannot guarantee that every mention of a Donald is Donald Trump as opposed to some other Donald.”
The Maryland Democrat acknowledged that the “database review tool” provided to members of the House Judiciary Committee — including Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Becca Balint (D-Vt.) — is “confusing, unreliable, and clunky.”
Raskin also noted that “one of the first documents” he came across during his review was particularly noteworthy, as it appeared to contradict Trump’s prior claims that he had broken off his documented friendship with Epstein years earlier than it seems.
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The document in question was a 2009 email from Epstein to his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, which was itself a forwarded conversation between his lawyers and attorneys for Trump, which Raskin pointed out earlier this week while speaking to reporters.
He explained Monday, “Epstein’s lawyers synopsized and quoted Trump as saying that Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of his club at Mar-a-Lago — but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago and he had never been asked to leave.”
“And that was redacted for some indeterminate, inscrutable reason,” Raskin continued.
Trump has denied all wrongdoing and claimed he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago after finding out he “stole people” who worked there. Raskin noted Tuesday that the 2009 exchange is “just one memo out of 3 million” Epstein files in the DOJ’s possession.
He added that the millions of documents that haven’t yet been publicly released “are the ones I’d like to see,” dismissing the Trump administration’s claims that these are merely duplicate copies of previously shared files: “If they’re duplicative, what’s the problem?”
Raskin continued, “We’ll be the judge of that.”
