President Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pamela Bondi, recently announced that the Justice Department will not release documents about the politically connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, citing privacy concerns around child pornography allegedly included in the files.

But the department’s recent memo contradicts the agency’s prior legal rationale in a concurrent court case seeking the release of those same files, according to court records reviewed by the Lever.

The Trump administration’s July 2025 memo is the latest in a series of changing Justice Department arguments aiming to block the public records disclosure of more than 11,000 pages of documents the government has amassed related to the 2006 Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of Epstein.