Donald Trump's name “anonymized” by the FBI in the Epstein case: reasons of “confidentiality” cited

The FBI has redacted the names of current US President Donald Trump and several other prominent figures in the Epstein case for confidentiality reasons, in anticipation of a possible disclosure of the documents, financial news agency Bloomberg reported on Saturday.

The FBI had previously been tasked with reviewing all documents for possible disclosure. On that occasion, not only the name of the current president, but also those of several other prominent figures were concealed, as at the time of the investigation, which began in 2006, they were private citizens.

The anonymization of certain names in this type of file is in itself a common practice, stipulated in the Freedom of Information Act. It is also commonly applied in files that are not subject to this law, as is the case here. Certain information may also be omitted for security reasons or in the interests of an ongoing investigation.

In total, around a thousand FBI agents were tasked with examining more than 100,000 documents. They found “several” mentions of Trump's name. The fact that his surname appears in the file does not mean that he was under investigation or suspected, let alone accused of anything.

The Epstein case has been causing headaches for the Trump administration for weeks. When she was appointed, Attorney General Pam Bondi said she would make the entire case public, but in July, it was suddenly announced that this would no longer be the case. This caused an uproar within the MAGA community, which has long been convinced that this is a cover-up operation. Trump is having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle.