Representative Jamie Raskin dropped a political grenade this week, claiming that when he searched the unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files for President Donald Trump’s name, it came up more than a million times — a figure that would dwarf the roughly 5,300 mentions in the already-released redacted trove and ignites fresh fury over how much remains hidden from public view.
In an interview with Axios, Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said the sheer volume of hits was astonishing, and that it points to a Justice Department cover-up because most of the roughly 6 million Epstein files have not been made public. He stressed that he typed in “Trump,” “Donald,” or “Don” to generate the results.
“It’s all over the place,” Raskin said, trying to convey both the scale and the opacity of what lawmakers are seeing — or still aren’t seeing.
One of the first things Raskin pointed to was a 2009 email between Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell that includes a recounting of lawyers’ conversation involving Trump. In it, Trump is paraphrased as saying Epstein was “a guest at Mar-a-Lago” and “we never asked him to leave” — contradicting the long-standing narrative that Trump banished Epstein from his Florida estate years earlier.
That single document is just a drop in a three-million-page bucket that DOJ has released — and a three-million-page bucket that the administration claims is mostly duplicative and therefore safe to keep under wraps. Raskin isn’t buying it.
This flurry of unredacted oversight comes after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in late 2025, forcing the department to release scores of records to the public. But lawmakers can only view the truly unredacted materials on secure terminals at DOJ headquarters — a process Raskin has blasted as slow and insufficient.
Raskin’s comments have sparked responses far outside Capitol Hill. Late-night hosts and media figures hammered headlines about the “million mentions,” while survivors’ advocates and even some Republican lawmakers said the new disclosures raise real questions about what else might be buried in those still-sealed files.
The White House has stood by Trump’s longtime claim that he distanced himself from Epstein after falling out over misconduct at Mar-a-Lago — even as the unredacted files hint at a more complicated history.
Critics argue the refusal to release the full trove isn’t about protecting national security or victims, but about protecting powerful people whose names appear again and again in documents that the public still can’t see. Whether this latest bombshell turns into real political accountability — or just more headlines and denials — is shaping up to be one of the next big fights in Washington.
