Legal expert 'absolutely stunned' by new revelations about Epstein files delay

MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin on Wednesday said that she was "absolutely stunned" by new revelations about how the Justice Department handled the Epstein files release process, while her colleague, former federal prosecutor Berit Berger, said that she had "never seen" victims treated as badly in a case as the Trump administration has treated Epstein's.

Rubin and Berger were interviewed together by MS NOW's Ana Cabrera about new findings in the DOJ's tranche of disclosed Epstein files. While Rubin noted that she found no change in the status of missing material related to abuse allegations against Donald Trump, she did uncover a new exchange related to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in which he explicitly instructed staffers to flag the type of materials that are currently missing as it pertained to the Trump allegations.

"That's a January 4th, 2026 memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche," Rubin explained. "On [that date], Deputy Attorney General Blanche is writing a nine-page memo to people at the department who were charged with doing the first-level review of documents for production. And one of the things that the deputy attorney general instructs them to do in this memo is once they determine that something is responsive to one of the nine categories that Congress mandates they need files for."

She continued: "He says, there are some types of documents that we want you to particularly flag or tag while you're going through the electronic database, and one of them is something called a 302. Berit knows this well, as a former federal prosecutor, but a 302 is the form that the FBI uses to memorialize interviews. That's the exact kind of document that we reported yesterday was missing with respect to this particular accuser."

Reporters like Rubin and Roger Sollenberger have noted that 302 files regarding FBI interviews with a woman who accused Trump of sexually abusing her as a minor in the 1980s seem to have been missing from the public Epstein files database. While the interviews do not indicate that there was further proof that Trump committed the alleged abuse, these missing files puncture the DOJ's claim that it is not covering up any material that could be damaging to the president.

Rubin noted that, as far as they can tell, these missing materials were not published then removed later. However, she also added that there should be "nothing" in one of these FBI memos that could have it flagged to be withheld.

"The obligation is to produce the most full version of that chain and not the first version of the message. It's just not it's not cognizable to me why it is that they withheld these," Rubin added.

Later on in the discussion, Berger chastised the administration for its treatment of Epstein's victims, stating that she had "never seen" anything like it in her time as a prosecutor.

"I have never seen victims treated like this," Berger said. "In any case that I prosecuted, that had identifiable witnesses, victims.
I mean, just to break it down, right? They have been just left out of the justice side of this on every single turn, you know, first, with having information about themselves revealed that was not redacted. Their names, nude photographs of them, things that we've heard from them that they never thought would ever see the light of day, to have that included in the production, and then at the same time to have interviews that they conducted, reports of those interviews not included."

She added: "It leads them to wonder who's in charge of this, who's making sure that this actually is a complete and comprehensive investigation."

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