Tonight in Your Rights: Epstein survivors' privacy exposed
It may be the "single most egregious victim privacy violation in one day" in U.S. history, involving "thousands of redaction failures."
“Tonight in Your Rights” is a legal roundup for particularly active days in U.S. courts.
Today was one of them.
One of the most prominent attorneys for Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors said it may have been “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history.”
On Friday, the Justice Department uploaded more than 3.5 million files to the agency’s Epstein Library, more than a month after the deadline set by Congress. Prosecutors justified that delay on the “rigorous” manual review of the documents by more than 500 attorneys taking a “victim-oriented approach.”
Attorneys Brad Edwards and Brittany Henderson, two of the most prominent lawyers for Epstein victims, saw little evidence of that exhaustive review.
“Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ’s latest release,” they wrote in a five-page letter.
The survivors’ attorneys quoted harrowing stories from their clients, who have seen their names, dates of birth, bank information, driver’s license numbers, email addresses, or home addresses exposed.
“I have never come forward!” Jane Doe 5, one of the survivors, is quoted as saying. “I am now being harassed by the media and others. This is devastating to my life ... Please pull my name down immediately as every minute that these documents with my name are up, it causes more harm to me... Please, I’m begging you to delete my name!!!”
The New York Times reported that the Justice Department also released dozens of nude photographs, including young women and possibly teenagers who could have been minors.
The letter states: “There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred — particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication.”
Edwards and Henderson noted that avoiding such disclosures should have been simple.
The Justice Department’s Epstein Library operates through a search engine, and the agency reviewing the documents could have run the list of known victims through it before publishing to avoid accidental disclosure.
“DOJ cannot plausibly characterize this as error, negligence, or bureaucratic failure. The task was straightforward: take the list of known victims and redact those names everywhere they appear. When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim’s name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided.”
Multiple survivors quoted in the letter reported receiving death threats.
“The press makes up crazy stories and shows me as a legitimate target for others to attack me physically and in the press,” Jane Doe 7 said. “My life is in imminent danger as long as you keep on releasing more files and info about me and not remove and redact the ones already released.... This is a life threatening situation for me. Please take my plea seriously.”
Recognizing the “urgency” of the situation, U.S. District Judge Richard Berman scheduled a conference to take place in Manhattan Federal Court on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
Read the letter here.
More Minnesota prosecutors exit
The exodus of prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota is continuing, as a new wave of eight people may be heading towards the door, the Star Tribune reports.
In the first wave, the office lost one of the top prosecutors behind the sprawling fraud investigation that grabbed national headlines.
The paper reports:
“The departures follow the mass exit of six veteran prosecutors who left the office last month in protest of recent directives from the U.S. Department of Justice, including the department’s refusal to initiate a civil rights investigation into the killing of Renee Good.
Among those leaving is Ana Voss, the civil division chief, who has been helping to handle hundreds of wrongful detention petitions flooding the office since federal officers began their immigration crackdown in Minnesota.”
Throughout Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has fired prosecutors or forced them to resign for failing to follow the directives of political leadership.
Read the Star Tribune’s coverage here.
Judge preserves protected status for Haitians
George Washington’s vision beat Kristi Noem’s “take.”
Within hours of the Trump administration’s planned deadline to terminate immigration protections for 350,000 Haitians living in the United States, a federal judge shielded that population in a blistering ruling rebuking Noem’s rhetoric as an affront to the nation’s founding principles.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes wrote:
“On December 2, 1783, then-Commander-in-Chief George Washington penned: ‘America is open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions.’ More than two centuries later, Congress reaffirmed President Washington’s vision by establishing the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. […] It provides humanitarian relief to foreign nationals in the United States who come from disaster-stricken countries. It also brings in substantial revenue, with TPS holders generating $5.2 billion in taxes annually. See Part VI.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem has a different take.
The judge then embedded Noem’s xenophobic social media post.
The judge ended her 83-page memorandum opinion in similarly scathing fashion.
“There is an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).
Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”
Read the full opinion here.
DHS restrictions on Congressional Oversight blocked, again
That wasn’t the only judicial rebuke against Noem on Monday.
For a second time, a federal judge struck down Noem’s policy requiring that Congress members provide advanced notice before visiting immigration detention centers.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb first blocked the seven-day advanced notice requirement, finding that it violated the terms of an appropriations bill in December. Noem reinstated a virtually identical policy roughly three weeks later, claiming that she was pulling the funding from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which didn’t have the same provisions.
Cobb agreed with Democratic Congress members led by Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado that “it would be logistically difficult, if not impossible, for DHS to identify and segregate the relevant expenditures” to avoid using restricted funds.
Read her ruling here.
Lindsey Halligan hit with new bar complaint
After the spectacular collapse of her attempt to prosecute James Comey and Letitia James, Trump's would-be prosecutor Lindsey Halligan is now out of the Department of Justice.
On Monday, Campaign for Accountability president Michelle Kuppersmith filed a new bar complaint against Halligan, seeking to discipline her for alleged ethical violations.
We discussed her effort in the video above on the All Rise News playlist for Legal AF.
The failure to redact the survivors' names and identifying information was at best reckless, at worst intentional. I cannot dispel the nagging thought that it was the latter.
These are vile people, continuing to inflict pain and suffering on the innocent, the victimized and abused, and the vulnerable.