A senior Justice Department official said Sunday that the release of new Jeffrey Epstein documents is unlikely to lead to additional prosecutions, arguing that disturbing photos and troubling emails alone do not necessarily provide enough evidence to bring criminal cases.
Department officials said over the summer that a review of Epstein-related records did not establish a basis for new criminal investigations.
That position remains unchanged, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said, even as a massive document dump since Friday has focused fresh attention on Epstein's links to powerful individuals around the world and revived questions about what, if any, knowledge the wealthy financier's associates had about his crimes.
"There's a lot of correspondence. There's a lot of emails. There's a lot of photographs. There's a lot of horrible photographs that appear to be taken by Mr. Epstein or people around him," Blanche said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." "But that doesn't allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody."
He said that victims of Epstein's sex abuse "want to be made whole," but that "doesn't mean we can just create evidence or that we can just kind of come up with a case that isn't there."
