Katie Phang Is A Badass

Did a journalist / lawyer just crack the Epstein files?

Photo courtesy of Yahoo News

On June 25, a federal judge issued the first binding order in the long, frustrating effort to force the Justice Department to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. In a 48-page order, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan compelled acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to produce specific, long-withheld materials that DOJ had spent months insisting it was under no obligation to release. If DOJ could not produce them, it would have to specifically explain why.

The plaintiff was Katie Phang, a Yale-educated lawyer, a former Miami-Dade and Broward County prosecutor, a former MSNBC host, and now an independent journalist and Substacker who had spent years covering Jeffrey Epstein and his network, including personally reviewing the files DOJ had released. Two months after she filed suit, and admittedly to my own delighted surprise, she achieved what congressional lawmakers, the law’s own authors and a succession of watchdog litigants could not: She got a court order compelling disclosure.

A clear law, openly flouted

The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House 427–1 in November 2025. The Senate passed it the same day by unanimous consent, and Trump signed it into law on November 19.

The statute was unambiguous: the attorney general had 30 days from enactment of the law to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” in DOJ’s possession relating to Epstein. No record could be withheld on the basis of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” The deadline was December 19, 2025.

DOJ missed it. On the deadline itself, Blanche went on Fox News to announce that only “several hundred thousand” documents would be released that day, with more expected “over the next couple of weeks”—a rolling schedule the statute did not permit. DOJ simultaneously informed Congress that the release was incomplete.

A months-long drip of partial releases followed. There were botched redactions and shifting explanations. The Department finally released a large tranche on January 30, 2026, then declared the matter closed. Of the roughly six million pages DOJ claimed it had reviewed, approximately 3.5 million had been made public.

There was turmoil behind the scenes. In April, Trump fired his attorney general Pam Bondi and elevated Blanche to Acting Attorney General. Blanche promptly declared the chapter closed. On Fox News on April 14, when asked whether he had authority to release more files, Blanche replied: “No, we have released everything. We reviewed six million pieces of paper. What we released was anything associated with the Epstein file. We are not sitting on a single piece of paper.”

That same day, in a separate interview with NBC’s Laura Jarrett, Blanche declared, “We have produced every single relevant document that has anything to do with the Epstein files.” His position was that no court had told him otherwise.

All roads run into a DOJ wall

For months, lawmakers, plaintiffs and the law’s own co-authors threw every available tool at the DOJ’s wall of denial and cover-up. But each attempt ran into the same verdict from the courts: legitimate concern, wrong avenue.

Congress moved first. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed DOJ for the Epstein files in August 2025. The subpoena produced partial cooperation, followed by more stonewalling. Lawmakers pushed to depose then-Attorney General Pam Bondi under oath, securing a bipartisan committee vote to compel her testimony. But House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) allowed Bondi to meet voluntarily with committee members behind closed doors in March, and the session collapsed when Democrats walked out, saying she refused to commit to complying with the subpoena. Trump fired her on April 2, seeking to moot the effort entirely.

The law’s own co-sponsors also tried the courts. In January 2026, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), the bipartisan architects of the EFTA, wrote to Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York, who was overseeing aspects of the criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell. Khanna and Massie requested the appointment of a special master to compel DOJ compliance. “The Department of Justice is openly defying the law by refusing to release the full Epstein files,” Khanna said. “Put simply, the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act.”

DOJ responded that Judge Engelmayer had no authority to grant the request, and that the lawmakers lacked standing because they were not parties in Maxwell’s criminal case. Engelmayer agreed. The questions Khanna and Massie raised were “undeniably important and timely,” he wrote, and they raised “legitimate concerns about whether DOJ is faithfully complying with federal law.” But he added: “This federal criminal case does not give the Court jurisdiction over—or authority to supervise—DOJ’s compliance with the EFTA, a civil records disclosure statute.” Engelmayer pointed out that the lawmakers were free to file a separate lawsuit. But standing might still present a problem.

Watchdog litigants had been trying through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for years, with similarly disappointing results. American Oversight had filed FOIA requests as early as July 2020 seeking FBI interview records documenting any questioning of Trump during the 2006–2008 Epstein investigation. The FBI refused to confirm or deny that such records even existed, citing privacy concerns. By March 2026, DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel was telling American Oversight it had no responsive records at all.

The structural problem with FOIA ran deeper than any individual case. FOIA comes loaded with exemptions that let agencies keep sensitive material hidden. The EFTA was written precisely to override those exemptions for Epstein-related documents. A watchdog group filing a FOIA request for those same files could legally be turned away. DOJ exploited that gap ruthlessly.

As Khanna acknowledged in March, the law could have been written better: “Could the law have been better by 20%? Sure, but most of this is just blatant non-compliance with the law as is.”

The EFTA told the Justice Department what to do, but it was silent about what would happen if DOJ refused. And as Massie put it with mounting exasperation: “Men need to be perp-walked in handcuffs to the jail and until we see that here in this country, we don’t have a system of justice that’s working.”

Finding the right legal theory in

Enter Katie Phang, aka Badass. She filed her complaint on April 27, 2026, in federal court in Washington. She was represented by Brendan Ballou and Samuel T. Ward-Packard of the Public Integrity Project. Ballou is a former federal prosecutor who served as Special Counsel for Private Equity in the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, who interviewed Phang four days after the suit was filed, called what she had constructed “a novel theory, but one that’s very elegant.”

The core problem Phang had to solve was the same one that had vexed everyone else: The EFTA contains no enforcement clause. Congress wrote a mandatory disclosure obligation but neglected to include what happens when the executive ignores it—a major oversight considering how likely that outcome was.

Phang’s complaint put the issue plainly. Blanche’s failure to comply was “brazen, shocking, and ongoing,” but without an enforcement mechanism built into the statute, Phang could not simply sue under it directly. She invoked the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which authorizes courts to “hold unlawful and set aside agency action” found to be “contrary to constitutional right” or “in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations.” She argued that DOJ’s decisions to withhold and redact the files are government actions, that those actions break a law passed by Congress, and that a court could order them undone.

But she faced another hurdle: standing. To bring her novel argument to court, Phang also had to show she was personally harmed. Courts require a concrete injury that a ruling could fix. On this question, the complaint filed by her attorneys was both specific and inventive:

”The government’s failure to comply with the Act has made it harder for Phang to do her job. With key documents redacted, and with redactions entirely unexplained, it is difficult for Phang to understand and report about the meaning of the documents that have been produced. And with some documents retracted or never produced in the first place, it is impossible for her to understand and report about the full scope of the government’s investigation.”

Phang had personally reviewed the released files, published dozens of videos and reports on Epstein over the prior year, and could point to specific documents she needed and specific stories she could not write without them.

But DOJ still had the obvious counter: Why not just file a FOIA request like everyone else? Phang’s team had an answer for that too. The EFTA and FOIA are fundamentally different legal tools, whatever DOJ would later claim. The complaint laid out the distinction precisely. FOIA is a general transparency law with broad exemptions that agencies routinely use to withhold sensitive material. The EFTA, by contrast, was written specifically to override those exemptions. It requires the release of materials that FOIA would otherwise permit DOJ to keep hidden. It also imposed a fixed deadline and only five narrow carve-outs.

As legal commentator Marcy Wheeler noted, Phang’s legal team would later argue in its reply brief that the EFTA is “the most uncompromising disclosure statute ever enacted in American history”—built precisely because FOIA wasn’t enough.

California trial lawyer Mitch Jackson observed that most journalists would have “filed a FOIA request, waited eighteen months, sued for a fraction of what the statute already requires, and called it a career. Phang did the actual work.”

The motion to compel

The complaint described Blanche’s violations in three broad categories: improper redactions of names that the statute required to be disclosed, documents retracted or withheld entirely, and a complete failure to publish the redaction log the EFTA required. But in Phang’s May 28 motion for preliminary injunction, her legal team made the choice that would prove decisive.

Rather than asking the court to order a wholesale dump of everything withheld, Phang’s motion was surgical. It targeted a short, specific list of documents, identified by document number, with each challenged redaction argued on its own terms.

The specific categories Phang targeted were the names of possible co-defendants in a draft indictment and co-conspirators in internal DOJ prosecution emails; the names redacted from at least eight email exchanges involving Epstein regarding a “torture video” and sexual activity with minors; and FBI interview notes on a woman who alleged that around 1983, when she was about 13, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who assaulted her—notes the FBI had found credible enough to prompt four separate interviews, and which had been produced to Maxwell’s defense team but never made public. Phang also sought foreign language materials DOJ had declined to review and the long-overdue redaction log, required by the statute since December 19, 2025.

Critically, as Wheeler notes, the motion did not demand that any of these documents be unredacted outright. On each item, it offered DOJ a way out: produce the material, or explain in writing why you cannot. That made the motion narrow enough that the Justice Department could not plausibly call it a fishing expedition, and specific enough that silence on the merits would itself become a concession.

DOJ filed its opposition on June 5. Across 22 pages, the government never addressed the substance of Phang’s claims. Instead, it spent its entire brief arguing that the court had no jurisdiction to hear the case at all, then closed by asking Sullivan to stay any order for 60 days, a window that, as Wheeler notes, would have pushed the matter past Blanche’s Senate confirmation hearing, scheduled for mid-July.

The best defenses contain fallback arguments—“even if” constructions that reach the merits if procedural defenses fail. The Justice Department elected not to do that here, raising the risk that, on appeal, these arguments could be deemed waived.

Then, on June 24, Phang filed a notice of supplemental evidence that dismantled DOJ’s only substantive argument. Her attorneys attached letters showing that the DOJ had been simultaneously denying Epstein-related FOIA requests on the grounds that everything subject to FOIA had already been released. In other words, the Justice Department was simultaneously telling the court FOIA was an adequate remedy while telling FOIA requesters that there was nothing left to produce. Judge Sullivan ordered DOJ to respond to the supplemental filing by 1 p.m. the following day.

It did not.

Concession by silence

By the afternoon of June 25, Judge Sullivan had seen enough. Over his long career, he has presided over some of the most consequential government accountability cases of the past three decades, and he has little patience for executive branch stonewalling. He issued his 48-page memorandum opinion and granted Phang’s preliminary injunction.

As Vance noted, the threshold question was whether Phang had the right to bring the case at all. Sullivan found she did. A “denial of access to information qualifies as an injury,” he wrote. And Phang had documented economic harm flowing directly from DOJ’s noncompliance. Phang is a journalist who could not fully report a story she had been covering for years because the government was withholding materials it was legally required to release.

As All Rise News reported, Sullivan found that Phang was

“suffering the type of harm — lack of transparency — that Congress sought to prevent by requiring disclosure of the information, and the disclosure of the information that Ms. Phang seeks would help her in her work.”

He identified half a dozen specific stories she could not report because of the withheld material. He called the government’s argument that her injury was no different from any member of the public's “unpersuasive”—and its FOIA fallback “without merit.”

Sullivan noted the waiver question, too: “By not responding substantively to the specifics identified in the motion for a preliminary injunction, the Attorney General has conceded Ms. Phang’s merits arguments in the pending motion.” He cited D.C. Circuit precedent establishing that failure to respond to an argument constitutes forfeiture of the right to contest it—not just for purposes of the injunction, but on appeal as well.

The injunction Sullivan issued was framed in terms that made Blanche’s position unmistakable: “The Act required the Attorney General to publicly disclose the documents that are covered by it, and complying with the law does not harm the Attorney General.” More than once in the opinion, Sullivan wrote: “The Attorney General has conceded that he is in violation of the Act.”

The order required DOJ to produce or explain by this Thursday, July 2, each of the specific categories Phang had targeted. On the question of irreparable harm, Sullivan accepted Phang’s argument that the approaching midterm elections made delay particularly damaging: “The current high level of interest in the Epstein Files combined with the upcoming mid-term elections amounts to a circumstance that itself constitutes irreparable harm, especially where the Attorney General has not disputed that he is in violation of the Epstein Act.”

Sullivan then turned to the DOJ’s request for a stay. DOJ had asked for up to 60 days—in other words, enough time to get past Blanche’s confirmation hearing. Sullivan denied the request. If the DOJ wanted a stay, it would have to seek one from the D.C. Circuit, he ruled.

Speaking to journalist Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News the day after the ruling, Phang kept the focus on what the order actually did:

“Judge Sullivan said to Blanche, ‘I’m ordering you to produce to the public,’ and that made me really happy — because this lawsuit’s not to give it to me. This lawsuit is to give it to the public, give it to the people, and really give it to the victims and survivors and let them be able to find more investigative leads to help them find their way to what they define as justice and accountability.”

What could still go wrong

The DOJ announced it would appeal the same day the order came down. A spokesperson issued a statement denying that Blanche had conceded anything, calling Sullivan’s interpretation “perverse” and accusing the judge of “driving misleading headlines.” The statement added: “This judge is suggesting DOJ violate the law by un-redacting victim names, who as the Department has always explained, sadly became co-conspirators. DOJ has produced all responsive documents and will appeal this decision with confidence.”

As Wheeler observed, that statement misstated what Sullivan had actually ordered. He did not require the unredacting of victim names. He required the Justice Department to identify which redacted names were victims if that was its reason for withholding them.

But the appeal itself is not without legal foundation. The government’s central question from the start was this: Was this the right lawsuit in the right court?

And as Vance observed, the clock is also a factor. DOJ must either comply with the July 2 deadline or persuade the D.C. Circuit to stay the order while the appeal plays out. If it does so, the practical effect is a delay, potentially a significant one.

This matters beyond the Epstein files

It would be easy to read Phang v. Blanche as a story about Jeffrey Epstein and the specific documents that a federal judge has now ordered released. What they contain may matter enormously, but the case is something larger.

EFTA is not the only transparency statute the executive branch has treated as optional. Across a range of disclosure obligations, the Trump White House has adopted a posture that statutes mean what the executive decides they mean, and that absent a court order, nothing compels compliance. (And even with a court order, it’s often iffy.) What Phang v. Blanche establishes, at least at the district court level, is that a journalist who can show concrete professional harm from an agency’s violation of a disclosure law may have a path to exactly that court order.

That template did not exist before April 27, 2026. Vance, writing on Civil Discourse the evening the ruling came down, added something she had been holding in reserve since May. She had called the theory “novel and elegant” when Phang filed. “And tonight, I can add successful,” Vance wrote.

The July 2 deadline is four days away.