The first sign of trouble came when Justice Department leadership, sworn and ordinarily inclined to follow the law, casually blew off its statutory due date. The Epstein Files Transparency Act — passed 427-1 in the House, unanimously affirmed in Senate, then signed by the president — required that the DoJ “shall” (not “may”) produce “all” (not “some”) documents within 30 days of the law’s November 19 enactment. Yet when the December 19 deadline hit, Justice Department leadership channeled the Fast Times at Ridgemont High stoner Jeff Spicoli to explain its unlawful delinquency: Just couldn’t make it on time.

Things spiraled from there. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche reassured Congress that DOJ was really, really trying its hardest and would finish its work “over the next two weeks.” Yet as the Justice Department sporadically dropped additional document “tranches” throughout the Christmas holiday, Blanche announced that prosecutors had “uncovered over a million more documents potentially related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.” (“Uncovered” is a charitable word choice, given that the documents mostly sat in the DoJ’s own internal files.) We currently have no idea where the overall production stands. Has the DoJ released, say, 95 percent of the Epstein files? Fifty percent? Twenty-two percent? The Justice Department itself seems not quite sure.

Compounding the problem, the rollout of the so-called Epstein Library was riddled with bush-league errors. The word-search function — specifically required by the act — didn’t work for hours after the initial production went live, surely resulting in countless searches for “Trump” (or “Clinton”) that produced no results. (Now each yields over 300.) Thousands of documents,

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