Claim:
FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi spent nearly $1 million in overtime pay for personnel to redact the files related to the case of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Rating:
Context
The FBI released files to Bloomberg investigative Reporter Jason Leopold following a civil lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. These files indicated that the agency had spent at least $851,244 the week of March 17, 2025, in overtime pay for 934 agents mobilized to process and redact the Epstein files as part of a project called Epstein Transparency Project 2025. Snopes verified the records were authentic using public documents the FBI filed in response to the lawsuit. The available documents neither confirmed nor disproved the related claims that the overtime pay was specifically for removing Trump’s name from the files or that all of the money went to “redaction training.”
In November 2025, a rumor circulated that FBI Director Kash Patel and the head of the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi, had spent nearly $1 million in overtime pay for FBI personnel to redact the files related to the case of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A Nov. 28, 2025, post on X said the FBI had “quietly poured roughly $1M into overtime hours to scrub and redact the Epstein files,” calling it “treason” (archived):
As of this writing, this post had amassed more than 72,000 likes and 2.2 million views.
Variations of the claim appeared elsewhere online. One Instagram user said in a video that Patel and Bondi spent $1 million to “pull Trump’s name out of the Epstein files,” referring to President Donald Trump. Another version of the rumor appeared on X, where one user said the FBI “spent nearly $1 million for redaction training for the Epstein files,” citing The Daily Beast.
In short, FBI documents confirm the agency spent more than $850,000 on overtime pay for agents tasked with processing and redacting files related to the Epstein case. As a result, we’ve rated the claim true.
The available documents neither confirmed nor disproved the related claims that the overtime pay was specifically for removing Trump’s name from the files or that all of the money went to “redaction training.”
Origin of the claim
The claim came from a report (archived) by Jason Leopold, an investigative reporter at Bloomberg News. Leopold runs a newsletter named “FOIA Files,” in which he uses his expertise in obtaining and navigating government documents under the Freedom of Information Act to back his investigations. In his Nov. 25, 2025, edition of the newsletter, Leopold linked to a 71-page PDF that included a letter dated the previous day and that bore seal of the FBI in response to “Civil Action No.: 25-cv-2848” and regarding the “Epstein Transparency Project 2025.” Leopold’s address on the letter had been redacted.
These documents, which Leopold said the FBI released following a FOIA request and lawsuit he filed, indicated that the FBI paid $851,344 in overtime to process the Epstein files — in other words, to scour and redact them, though the documents did not specify what information was being redacted. The records also showed 934 agents worked a total of 14,278 hours in “premium pay” (overtime) on the files. In his report, Leopold said that these numbers corresponded to the period between March 17 and March 22, 2025.
“The files I shared online are the complete files,” Leopold told Snopes in a text message. “They [the FBI] released this just to me in response to my lawsuit and emailed my attorney the records,” he added, referring to the lawyer who represented him and Bloomberg in the lawsuit they filed following his FOIA request.
While there was no evidence the FBI and its parent agency, the Department of Justice, had shared the documents publicly, Snopes confirmed that on Aug. 25, 2025, Leopold and Bloomberg filed a civil lawsuit against the FBI and the DOJ to compel them to produce “records regarding the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.” The lawsuit came after Leopold’s FOIA request, filed in March 2025, went unanswered for five months.
On Nov. 24, 2025, DOJ lawyers filed documentation that included the letter they sent Leopold and a list of records the FBI released to Leopold and Bloomberg. That list matched the records Leopold published.
Leopold’s FOIA request
Among the documents pertaining to the lawsuit, Snopes found a Nov. 24, 2025, declaration by the FBI’s Record/Information Dissemination Section Chief Amie Marie Napier. This declaration came the day before Leopold published his report.
Annexed to this declaration, the FBI shared Leopold’s original FOIA request detailing the information he was seeking. Among the items he was looking to confirm were the number of FBI staff assigned to the task of processing the Epstein files during one week in March 2025, the cost of this effort, the number of hours they worked during that week and the instructions the staff received (Page 53 of the declaration):
3. A spreadsheet or similar data or document identifying the total number of FBI personnel who were ordered and/or tasked to work on processing Jeffrey Epstein files between March 17 and March 22. PLEASE NOTE: I am not interested in personal identifiable information. I am only interested in the number of FBI personnel who worked on this matter, their titles, and the field offices/divisions they work in.
4. The budget (if any such document exists) or a similar document identifying the total costs for FBI personnel to process Jeffrey Epstein files in response to any directive or order by FBI Director Kash Patel or his immediate aides and deputies.
5. The number of hours FBI personnel worked between March 17 through March 21 to process Jeffrey Epstein files. If the hours each agent worked are captured in a document I request a copy of that as well.
6. Any documented instruction or direction provided to FBI personnel on what type of research they were asked to conduct while processing Jeffrey Epstein files.
Documents the FBI released
The declaration’s appended documents also included the letter Leopold received and shared, which Napier signed (Page 96). In addition, the FBI provided a grid in which they itemized the documents they released to him, in full or in part (pages 103-106).
In this grid, Snopes identified the two items that revealed the number of extra hours, the number of agents who processed and redacted the Epstein files and the cost of their overtime. The “report documenting premium pay hours recorded during the period of March 17 through March 22, 2025” (Page 103) was released in part.
This corresponds to the table on pages 15 and 16 in Leopold’s file, most of which was redacted, except for the total numbers at the bottom. This is the document that revealed the FBI mobilized 934 agents across departments and field offices to process the Epstein files that week. Together, they worked a total of 14,278 “premium pay hours” between March 17 and March 22, 2025, which cost taxpayers $851,344.
The FBI released the “printout of overtime hours worked by RIDS units from January 20 2025 through July 29 2025” (Page 104 of the declaration) in full, the grid showed. This corresponds to the table on Page 23 of Leopold’s file. This document revealed that between January and July 2025, RIDS agents worked 4,737 hours in overtime, 3,472.25 of them in March, when the agency first processed the Epstein files.
Leopold’s files did not detail what instructions, exactly, the agents received for processing the files, though Page 45 referred to training videos posted on the “Transparency Project SharePoint site” on how to use the SharePoint site and how to redact using Adobe.
On March 24, 2025, an email from the Information Management Division of the FBI said that “phase 1 redactions” were complete “and non-IMD project teams can be released.” (RIDS is part of the IMD.) That same email referred to a Phase 2 that had not yet begun. In other words, “processing” the Epstein files meant reviewing them for release by identifying in them details for redaction. An email exchange from March 10 (pages 11, 12 and 13 of Leopold’s file) referred to a “clean copy of the redaction list,” confirming that redaction was a goal of the project.
In addition to the above, agents had to review videos, according to both the declaration and Leopold’s file.
While it is not clear that FBI agents “scrubbed” the files for Trump’s name specifically or that the training alone had cost nearly $1 million, as some posts claimed, the documents showed that the FBI mobilized nearly 1,000 agents to redact information from the files and that this effort had cost the FBI and its parent agency, the DOJ, at least $851,244 during a period the FBI referred to in emails attached to the files as “Phase 1” of the Epstein Transparency Project 2025, suggesting Phase 2 was in the works.
