- After the U.S. Department of Justice posted a trove of documents related to the case of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in mid-December 2025, a rumor circulated that the DOJ initially posted a document featuring references to President Donald Trump, but the department unpublished it in order to redact his name, before reposting the document with said redaction included.
- Snopes could find no evidence the DOJ had done this. However, the department did publish a less-redacted version of the document in the same cache of documents related to a 2015 legal case between Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. We contacted the DOJ asking for clarification and we will update this report should we obtain a response.
- The less-redacted document mentioned Trump several times, as well as other people whose names were redacted in the other version of the document, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
After the U.S. Department of Justice posted a cache of documents related to the case of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Dec. 19, 2025, a rumor spread online that the DOJ initially posted a document that included President Donald Trump’s name, but the department then removed the document from the cache in order to redact his name, before reposting it with said redaction.
For example, left-leaning publication Meidas Touch posted two different screenshots showing the same document on X, one of which purportedly included more redactions than the other, with some of the redactions covering Trump’s name (archived).
The caption read: “The DOJ appears to have redacted Donald Trump’s name from the allegations made in this exhibit in the Epstein files. Trump’s name was in the original release. Now, it’s blacked out.”
(X user @MeidasTouch)
The same claim appeared on Facebook and Instagram.
The posts by Meidas Touch and others seemed to suggest the screenshot on the left was “the original release” and the one on the right showed Trump’s name had later been “blacked out.”
But the two images were actually of different documents. The one on the left, with fewer redactions and Trump’s name included, had the words “Document 1332-16” and “Filed 01/08/2024” in blue at the top, while the image on the right, with more redactions and Trump’s name omitted, read “Document 1296-17” and “Filed 12/12/2022.” (More on this below.)
Both screenshots were available on the DOJ’s website documenting the Epstein files. In other words, the department posted a version of the document that mentioned Trump.
While the evidence Meidas Touch and others used did not prove the Justice Department redacted Trump’s name from one version of the document, it was possible the DOJ edited the version on the right of the image above after publishing it. Below, we show why we did not rate this claim.
Snopes contacted the DOJ to ask for clarifications and we will update this story if we receive an answer. We also reached out to Meidas Touch asking about the post and await a response.
What we know
The DOJ did post the two different versions of the document in two separate batches of files related to the 2015 legal case involving Virginia Giuffre — one victim of the sex trafficking Epstein orchestrated — and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s associate and accomplice.
One version, numbered 1296-17, showed more redactions and no reference to Trump (Page 16), while the other, numbered 1332-16, showed fewer redactions (Page 16) and included several mentions of Trump.
The screenshots circulating online were not, as those who shared them appeared to claim, before-and-after images of the document. The text in blue at the top of both screenshots showed they were screen captures of the two versions of the document.
Snopes found no details regarding when the DOJ published the two versions of the document. An examination of the DOJ web page‘s metadata revealed it had been modified on Dec. 22, 2025 — three days after the department made the Epstein documents public. It is possible the DOJ added the redactions to file 1296-17 after publication. Snopes could not independently verify whether this was the case.
In addition, The Associated Press reported that the DOJ removed at least 16 documents after the Dec. 19 publication of more Epstein files, suggesting department employees were still editing the release after publication.
In other words, while Meidas Touch and other social media users used faulty evidence to back their assertion that the DOJ modified a document after publication, Snopes could not ascertain, based on available evidence, whether the redactions on batch 1296-17 happened before or after publication. Meanwhile, the same document in batch 1332-16 was not redacted.
The less-redacted version is embedded below (Page 16):
(U.S. Department of Justice)
Comparing the two versions, it is clear that in the first batch, each mention of Trump had been redacted. In the less-redacted version of the document, the passage read (emphasis ours):
She confided in me about her casual “friendship” with Donald. Mr Trump definitely seemed to have a thing for her and she told me how he kept going on about how he liked her “pert nipples”.
Donald Trump liked flicking and sucking her nipples until they were raw. One evening when we were showering together she showed me her nipples. They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them. I also know she had sexual relations with Trump at Jeffery’s NY mansion on regular occasions as I once met Jen for coffee, just before she was going to meet Trump and Epstein together at his mansion.
Other names that appeared in the less-redacted version of the document and were redacted in batch 1296-17 included Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google; Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of 23andMe and Brin’s ex-wife; Sarah Kellen, often described as Maxwell’s and Epstein’s assistant; Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff and Natalie [Natalya] Malyshev, whom the document’s narrator described as the person who recruited the narrator on Epstein’s behalf.
According to the file, the narrator was Sarah Ransome, a woman who said she was a victim of Epstein’s trafficking ring. Ransome was deposed in the 2015 Giuffre v. Maxwell case.
In December 2025, Snopes confirmed that the DOJ and the FBI spent nearly $1 million in overtime pay in March 2025 for its agents to redact files related to Epstein.
