The blacked-out grand jury minutes
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Among the Jeffrey Epstein documents released in December 2025, John Kiriakou singled out one tranche as the clearest case of the government defeating its own release.

The order

Two different federal judges had ordered that the grand jury minutes be released, he said, and stressed how far outside normal practice that was: grand juries are usually completely secret, the sessions secret and the findings secret.

What arrived

What the order produced was a tranche of 119 pages. "They were all grand jury minutes," Kiriakou said, "and every single word was blacked out."

He drew the distinction that makes the redaction hard to defend. One would have expected the names of the victims to be blacked out, he allowed, and perhaps the names of the alleged perpetrators. "But every single word. Why? Why is that?"

The answer he was given

His guest's answer was that the Department of Justice simply did not want the public to know what had gone on in that grand jury, and went on to describe a separate, earlier Florida state grand jury that had found Epstein had not molested a single child, a proceeding whose transcripts were later released by the state's governor and which the guest characterised as corrupted.

Kiriakou did not adopt that reading. He recorded the anomaly and left the explanation to the person who had spent two decades on the case.

The wider claim

The blacked-out minutes were, for Kiriakou, one piece of a pattern. He put it to his guest that the administration had campaigned on releasing all of the documents, had been forced by Congress to do so within thirty days, and had then produced the material "in fits and starts," redacting heavily and adding little to the existing body of evidence. "I just don't see what the endgame is," he said.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Jeffrey Epstein
- Epstein Files Transparency Act
- The unredacted copy-paste
