Journalist and attorney Katie Phang, who is currently suing Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, has identified what she calls "the biggest red flag" in the recently handed-over unredacted Epstein records. Blanche, who previously served as a personal defense attorney for Donald Trump before his appointment as the Justice Department's top official, now oversees the agency whose redactions Phang is challenging.

Speaking on her podcast, Phang addressed her case against Blanche for the first time since the Department of Justice disclosed that it had turned over unredacted documents from the Epstein files. The lawsuit demands the release of the files with legally appropriate redactions.

Judge Emmet Sullivan, a senior federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, is currently reviewing the unredacted records in private and will determine what portions are suitable for public release. In a court filing, the DOJ defended its redaction practices and acknowledged that Jeffrey Epstein's email address had been inadvertently redacted.

"Todd Blanche admitted in his filing yesterday that Jeffrey Epstein's email address was redacted. He calls it an inadvertent redaction, but it's been redacted and has since been lifted," Phang explained. "Now, you may not think that's a big deal, but I think it's a very, very, very big deal. And in fact, that is the biggest red flag that you could find from what has happened here."

Phang's central legal argument is that the DOJ applied improper redactions in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, legislation intended to compel public disclosure of records related to the federal investigation into Epstein. She is demanding that the agency either release the documents or provide a formal justification for each redaction applied. The accidental redaction of Epstein's email address, she argued, "shows that the way that the redactions were done here was wrong."

"This wasn't some one-off mistake," Phang said. "We know for a fact that the Department of Justice released over and over again, hundreds and hundreds of times, the personal identifying information of several victims."

Phang noted that while the DOJ "wants to say, 'Oops, sorry, we missed it,'" the contrast between the release of victims' names and the redaction of Epstein's email address demonstrates a fundamentally broken process. "We know that it didn't work, and now we know that it also worked to protect the identity of Jeffrey Epstein, the main perpetrator of these crimes," she said.

Source: Raw Story