Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made news on Tuesday during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing when he confirmed that the Trump administration is dropping the nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund he was required to establish under a settlement agreement President Donald Trump entered into with the IRS and the Department of Justice last month. (Blanche also said, however, that he has no intentions to rescind that agreement or a related memo that broadly releases Trump, his family and his businesses from any and all tax-related liability incurred as of the settlement’s execution.)
But his exchange with Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., about the Epstein Files Transparency Act was just as revealing — and concerning.
Since February, the Justice Department has allowed members of Congress to view unredacted versions of documents it has released by visiting the department in person, relinquishing any electronic devices that could record the contents of unredacted documents and using specially designated computers.
Dean, who noted that she had previously met with Blanche in private to discuss her concerns about the DOJ’s compliance with the Epstein bill, told the hearing that she had viewed unredacted documents through this congressional “reading room.” She then turned to one document in particular: a 2009 email in which one of Epstein’s lawyers, Jack Goldberger, summarized for Epstein a phone call he had with Alan Garten, a longtime Trump Organization attorney.
In the portion of the email that has been made public, Goldberger tells Epstein that in lieu of a deposition in a case brought by Epstein survivors, Trump had spoken to the survivors’ lawyer by phone for roughly 20 minutes and that Garten had shared the contents of that conversation with Goldberger. The portion of the email in which Goldberger describes what he learned from Garten is then blacked out.
Dean, however, held up a notepad covered in handwriting and read aloud from her notes of what is underneath that redaction. Trump, Goldberger wrote, had told the survivors’ lawyer that Epstein was not a member of Mar-a-Lago, nor had he been kicked out. Trump also apparently told the survivors’ lawyer that he only knew about the allegations against Epstein from what he read in newspapers. And the reason Garten called Goldberger to begin with? According to Goldberger, it was because Trump specifically asked Garten to advise Epstein’s lawyers about the interview.
The redaction, Dean concluded, “has nothing to do with redacting victims’ names,” then told Blanche, who previously served as one of Trump’s personal lawyers, that he is “gravely conflicted.”
What went unsaid was how Trump’s apparent statements to the survivors’ lawyer, which remain redacted in the public version of the email, run counter to his own narratives about Epstein.
Consider that in 2009, Trump apparently denied kicking Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago and then asked his lawyer to ensure that Epstein’s legal team learned of that denial. Yet last year, Trump said he did kick Epstein out of his club, for poaching employees. His White House staff has likewise claimed that Trump forced Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, albeit for slightly different reasons. Both White House communications director Steven Cheung and press secretary Karoline Leavitt have said publicly that Trump ejected Epstein from Mar-a-Lago because he was “a creep”; Leavitt added that it was because Epstein was “a pedophile.”
Another contradiction revealed by Dean’s description of the email: In 2009, Trump denied any personal knowledge of Epstein’s alleged abuse, whereas an FBI memo of a 2019 interview with former Palm Beach County Chief of Police Michael Reiter tells a remarkably different story. Specifically, Reiter told the FBI that Trump called him in 2006 — that is, roughly three years before Trump’s phone call with the survivors’ lawyer — to thank him for investigating Epstein. According to the memo, Reiter recalled Trump saying, “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” and that people in New York knew Epstein was “disgusting.”
In responding to Dean, Blanche insisted that the DOJ was “legally obligated” to redact the email not because of any victim-identifying information but because it was “a privileged communication between counsel.”
But that explanation likely does not hold up as a legal matter.
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First, the email wasn’t a communication between two attorneys, it was between Epstein and his lawyer. And even if what Blanche meant is that the email reflected a communication between two lawyers, the law generally does not protect as privileged the communications between lawyers for different clients.
The only exception is for what are known as joint defense or common interest agreements, when two people are both defendants in a legal matter, or expect they will become co-defendants. The D.C. Bar has defined a joint defense agreement (which need not be in writing) as “a way for clients and their lawyers to share privileged information with third parties without waiving otherwise applicable privileges.” But there is no indication in the public record, much less any suggestion by Blanche or others, that Trump and Epstein had that kind of arrangement.
Second, Epstein forwarded the entire communication to his convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. Typically, once a client shares an attorney-client communication with a third party, there is no more privilege.
That raises the question of whether Epstein had a joint defense or common interest agreement with Maxwell dating back to 2009, when Epstein was still serving his limited sentence in Florida. A source familiar with the Epstein investigation dating back to the 2000s tells MS NOW that Epstein and Maxwell did not have such an arrangement as of 2009.
For all of these reasons, the document Dean described in the hearing does not seem to be privileged, which would also mean it should not have been redacted.
It also calls into question other redactions that do not appear to protect information about survivors but instead seem to concern men in Epstein’s social orbit.
After all, if the full 2009 email cited by Dean exposes inconsistencies in Trump’s story and was redacted improperly, it does little to reassure the public — and more important, the Epstein survivors — that the millions of other documents were not redacted in a way to similarly conceal equally embarrassing, or possibly even incriminating, information about Epstein’s friends and associates.
Perhaps most importantly, it also calls attention to Blanche’s veracity and compliance with the law just as Trump has announced his intent to nominate Blanche to the permanent attorney general post.
Lisa Rubin
Lisa Rubin is MS NOW’s senior legal reporter and a former litigator.