What You Will — and Won’t — Find in the Epstein Files

The document’s official title didn’t exactly pop: “Communication From Kenneth W. Starr, Independent Counsel, Transmitting a Referral to the United States House of Representatives Filed in Conformity With the Requirements of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595(c).” But immediately upon its September 11, 1998, release, it was universally rebranded The Starr Report and became a runaway best seller.

Publishers panic-rushed at least 1.5 million copies to bookstores. (Because the report was a government document, anybody could reprint and sell it without having to pay for intellectual-property rights.) The Starr Report doubled first-day sales of Tom Clancy’s wildly popular novel Rainbow Six — and it spurred a collateral spike in demand for Leaves of Grass, the Walt Whitman poetry book that President Bill Clinton had given to his White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

Public interest in The Starr Report pushed the outer capacity of the then-nascent internet. The Chicago Tribune noted that while some official government websites “virtually seized up,” private commercial sites generally fared better in “one of the biggest tests yet of the global electronic network.” The Wall Street Journal marked the occasion as both a political and technological landmark: “Starr Report Makes History and Marks Web’s Emergence.” As Wired magazine put it, “For the first time, if you didn’t have the net, you were missing history.”

Anyone who is near my age will remember the experience. Download … error message. Download … crash. Download … nothing. And then, eventually, download, and … holy shit.

It was all there, in lurid, bodice-ripping nuance: everything about the president’s relationship with Lewinsky — and far more than could ever be legally relevant. Sol Wisenberg, a senior prosecutor on Starr’s team, conceded to me in a 2025 interview that some of the prurient detail “may have been more than we needed.” Indeed.

If you’re expecting a similarly revelatory moment of transparency when the Jeffrey Epstein files become public next week — another collective “I remember exactly where I was”–type experience — then prepare for disappointment.

Last month, Congress passed and the president signed the misleadingly titled Epstein Files Transparency Act. (A more accurate title, as we’ll discuss in a moment, would be the Epstein Files We’ll Produce Whatever We Want Act. Not as catchy, admittedly.) The law passed after an extended display of shameless political hypocrisy by both parties. Democrats careered from prolonged indifference to a sudden self-righteous crusade to release the same files they could have made public at any time from 2021 to early 2023 (when they controlled the White House, Senate, and House) and then until January 2025 (when they still held the executive branch, including the DoJ).

Republicans, meanwhile, lurched mindlessly between extremes based on shifting political vibes and the fickle whims of President Donald Trump. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel rode into office full of bluster about how they would blow the lid off the Epstein files for all to see. But after Bondi’s much-hyped February 2025 release of “Phase One” — a dud, composed almost entirely of materials that were already public — she slammed it into reverse in July 2025 with a memo decreeing “it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” After that conclusion spurred near-universal condemnation, Bondi reverted to playacting as a crusader for transparency.

Meanwhile, Trump went from furiously lobbying congressional Republicans to prevent release of the files to disingenuously calling for full disclosure, once he saw that his suppressive effort was doomed. House Republicans played right along. They initially refused nearly unanimously to sign a discharge petition calling for release of the files — but days later voted 216 to 1 for disclosure upon getting the green light from the boss. The Senate fell in line with a fully unanimous vote.

The official White House statement upon Trump’s signing of the bill claims that the new law “requires the Attorney General to release all documents and records in possession of the Department of Justice relating to Jeffrey Epstein, and for other purposes.” But “all documents and records” isn’t even close. In fact, the law contains two major exceptions that effectively allow the government to hold back whatever the heck it wants.

First, the law allows the DoJ to withhold materials that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary.” Consider the timeline:

July 2025: Bondi and the FBI formally declare that, upon a full review of all Epstein-related materials, no evidence exists “that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” Case closed.

November 14, 2025, 10:35 a.m.: Trump posts on Truth Social, “I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions… ”

November 14, 2025, 2:12 p.m.: Bondi replies publicly to Trump’s post, “Thank you, Mr. President” (for what?) and notes that she has assigned the new investigations to the Southern District of New York. Case re-opened.

When asked to explain her reversal, Bondi stammered, “Information. That has come, uh, information. Umm. There’s information that, new information, additional information.” (This, folks, is the nation’s top prosecutor.)

So now that the DoJ apparently has opened some new criminal investigation into somebody or something, it will have the power under the new law to withhold any Epstein-related documents that might touch on those probes. Yet we don’t know exactly who is under investigation or how broadly those inquiries might span. Anyone outside the DoJ therefore will be essentially blind. We won’t know what we won’t know, and we’ll all just have to take Bondi’s word for it.

But surely the Justice Department — this Justice Department — isn’t investigating Trump himself. So any documents about his relationship with Epstein wouldn’t be covered by the criminal-investigations clause. And that brings us to the second exception: The law permits the Justice Department to withhold or redact any information that could compromise “national defense or foreign policy” or “the national security of the United States.”

Well, one might reasonably wonder, how could information about Trump and Epstein going club-hopping and female-ogling in the 1990s possibly put the country’s safety at risk? The answer, again, lies with Bondi alone. Couldn’t our servile attorney general conclude that any materials that might embarrass the president — our commander-in-chief and chief foreign diplomat — could harm his standing with other nations, thereby undermining our foreign policy?

Roll your eyes if you will — I’m with you — but that decision, again, will be Bondi’s alone. And, again, neither you nor I, and neither Congress nor the victims and anyone else in any position to object, will know what documents Bondi has chosen to withhold and why. All she needs is a hook, and the new law provides her with enough of those to do essentially whatever she wants.

We’ll see the Epstein files, or some portion of them, next week. We can reasonably expect to learn new details about Epstein’s criminal ring and about bad conduct by prominent men. But the new law, by its broad exemptions, ensures that we won’t get the most important answers — especially when Pam Bondi is the one who gets to decide.

Portions of this article about the Starr Report are adapted from Honig’s new book, “When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump”