An FBI employee warned in writing on March 24, 2025, that releasing the Epstein files "would violate multiple statutes" and expose the victims. The FBI's ethics office closed the complaint the next day.
Catherine Bruno ran that office. She was the FBI's chief ethics and compliance officer, and when the complaint reached her inbox she wrote that she intended to send it to the Justice Department's Inspector General. The FBI closed it instead. She says the bureau forced her to retire by May, Raw Story reported this morning. Nobody else has confirmed that.
About 1,000 FBI personnel worked through the Epstein files that March, and one of them wrote the complaint. The FBI employee wrote that staff "were instructed to flag any records in which the current President is mentioned." Sen. Dick Durbin made the same charge that July. The FBI employee wrote that staff "were informed to redact victim names only from a designated victim list," which "left exposed" the victims' personal information, child victims and witnesses included. So the reviewers had one order to protect the president and another that left the victims exposed.
Then the Justice Department used the victims as its reason to keep the files shut. The department wrote in July 2025 that "sensitive information relating to these victims is intertwined throughout the materials" and that "no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted." The department released nothing, and said the names were why.
The department released the files on Jan. 30 with the names still in them. The government has since acknowledged releasing several thousand pages of the survivors' personal information unredacted, their lawsuit says. About 100 of them sued in March. The FBI had held the warning for ten months when the names went out.
