The U.S. Department of Justice is reviewing more than 2 million additional documents related to investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, and dozens of South Florida lawyers have been called in to help, Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed in a letter to a New York judge Monday.

The Justice Department has posted about 12,000 documents in response to a December deadline to release its files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. There are more than 2 million additional documents “that are in various phases of review,” Bondi wrote.

The new transparency law required the Justice Department release files from all investigations into the convicted sex trafficker — who is believed to have abused about 1,000 victims — by Dec. 19. The department blew past that deadline, releasing less than 1% of the potentially relevant files in its possession so far, according to Bondi’s letter.

The Justice Department announced two weeks ago, after the December deadline passed, that it had “uncovered” over a million additional documents to review. The department now believes many of those files are copies or “largely duplicative” of documents it already had in its possession, but still require examination, according to Bondi’s letter.

Initially, Justice Department attorneys in D.C. and the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York were reviewing the files, Bondi told a judge in mid-December. Since then, “dozens of lawyers” from the Miami-based U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida, where Epstein was investigated in the mid-2000s, have started reviewing files as well.

Bondi said these attorneys are being pulled from the Florida office’s criminal and national security divisions. Former prosecutors with the office believe it has become increasingly politicized under U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, who is pushing to prosecute Donald Trump’s enemies, the Herald has reported.

In total, there are more than 400 lawyers across the Justice Department dedicated to reviewing Epstein files, Bondi said.

Also in the letter, which Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote to a judge in the U.S. case against Ghislaine Maxwell this week, the Justice Department described plans to “modify” its review process.

The department is changing its process for reviewing the documents, adding additional “electronic” reviews that were not included when Bondi detailed her plans for complying with the transparency law to the judge in December.

The latest updates come in addition to Blanche’s letter to Congress in December, obtained by the Herald, detailing the Justice Department’s plans to redact files above and beyond the requirements of the transparency act to protect victim information.

The Justice Department has also been blacking out information “otherwise covered by various privileges, including deliberative-process privilege, work-product privilege, and attorney-client privilege.”

Bondi said the new “electronic quality control searches” are to protect victim information that was inadvertently released in previous document dumps. But critics say the department has been withholding information from the released files without clear legal justification.

One document released last month, for example, redacted the names of the Epstein associates that were subpoenaed in 2019.

The roughly 12,000 documents that have been released thus far under the new transparency law have revealed dozens of new photos of Epstein and powerful figures, including former President Bill Clinton. They also included multiple references to Trump, with one 2020 memo revealing Trump was on many more flights with Epstein in the mid 1990s than the DOJ was initially aware of.

The documents also shed new light on the FBI’s investigations into others who may have participated in Epstein’s crimes, with one document naming 10 possible co-conspirators. The Justice Department redacted seven of these alleged co-conspirators’ names in the documents, drawing sharp criticism from the lawmakers that sponsored the bill forcing the release of the files.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Epstein’s financial transactions before his death in 2019, the newly released documents revealed. The files also revealed Epstein’s lawyers continued working to influence Florida prosecutors after they negotiated a cushy 2007 plea deal avoiding lengthy prison time for Epstein.

As the Miami Herald documented in its 2018 "Perversion of Justice” investigation, under that deal, Epstein was allowed to leave jail regularly to work from a nearby office space where, according to lawsuits, he allegedly continued to abuse girls.

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Miami Herald reporters Julie K. Brown and Ben Wieder contributed to this report.

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