Epstein Data Wiki

William Barr

Properties2
tagsperson, attorney-general, department-of-justice, bureau-of-prisons, oig, mcc-new-york, 2019
aliasesWilliam Barr, William P. Barr, Bill Barr

57 min read

OfficeAttorney General of the United States. He held the office when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on 6 July 2019, when Epstein was found dead at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on 10 August 2019, and while the Department’s response to that death was decided12
RecusalQuoted on Monday 8 July 2019 as saying he was recused from the Epstein matter. On Tuesday 9 July a Department official said he had consulted career ethics officials and “concluded he did not have to recuse himself from the current prosecution in Manhattan”, while remaining “recused from any retrospective review of the resolution of the earlier [Southern District of Florida] matter”1
The statement of 10 August 2019Two wordings of the same statement are in the release, thirty-eight minutes apart. The wording circulated to the U.S. Attorney at 11:57 a.m. Eastern reads “I have ordered a full, thorough, and independent investigation be conducted”; the wording issued as release AG 19-855 reads “In addition to the FBI’s investigation, I have consulted with the Inspector General who is opening an investigation”23
What the Inspector General’s report says about himNothing. Neither “Barr” nor “Attorney General” occurs anywhere in the 128 sheets of the report’s filed copy, and the report says it “initiated this investigation upon the receipt of information from the BOP”45
The Bureau of Prisons directorOn Monday 19 August 2019 he announced that the acting director was reassigned and that Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, whom he had appointed to the same post when he was previously Attorney General, would return to it6
His own account of the death, laterBy 22 November 2019 he was describing the death as “a perfect storm of screw-ups”, and said he had initially had suspicions of his own7
The Dalton School questionHis father Donald Barr was headmaster of the Dalton School; Epstein began teaching there in September 1974. Whether Donald Barr hired him is not established by any document read for this page, and the Department’s files hold both the assertion and the qualification that cuts against it89
Asked about him under transcriptThe Deputy Attorney General put questions about the two Barrs, on four subjects, to Ghislaine Maxwell in her recorded proffer of 24 July 2025. Every answer was negative101112

William P. Barr was Attorney General of the United States when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, when he died in federal custody a month later, and when the Department of Justice decided what to do about that death. This page is about his own acts and postures: the recusal he announced and then narrowed, the statement he issued and the sentence that did not survive into it, the Bureau of Prisons director he replaced, the way his own account of the death changed between August and November 2019, and the claim about his father and the Dalton School that is repeated far more confidently than the documents support.

What this page rests on, and why it is shaped this way

Most of what follows comes from the public record rather than from the released documents, and that is unusual on this wiki. The release is a production of private e-mail, investigative files, agency records and court papers. An Attorney General acts through public instruments, which a production of that kind cannot contain, so a search of the release for his name returns mainly newspaper articles that the Department and the Bureau were circulating to themselves. The phrase “William Barr” returns 421 pages across 223 documents; of those 223, the name is at the head of the sender field of exactly one. That last figure is a fact about the instrument through which an Attorney General speaks, which is a press release and not a mailbox, and it is not a fact about whether he acted.13

Two consequences follow, and both are deliberate. First, every section below says which of its findings sit on a document in the release and which sit on the public record; the reader should not have to guess. Second, where the release does carry an instrument, it is used for what it is: the internal circulation of the Attorney General’s statement before it was issued, the Department’s own correction of what his recusal covered, a senator’s letter demanding that he recuse, the Inspector General’s report, and a recorded proffer in which the Deputy Attorney General asked a witness about him. Those are the parts of this page that could not have been written from outside.

The death itself and the prosecution of the two officers on duty belong to Death of Jeffrey Epstein and the prosecution of the two MCC officers, and are not restated here.

Nothing on this page is a finding of wrongdoing by anyone.

The recusal, 8 and 9 July 2019

Epstein was arrested on 6 July 2019 and the indictment was unsealed on 8 July. On that Monday Barr told reporters that he was recused. The Department’s Office of Public Affairs for the Southern District of New York circulated a CNBC report of what happened next, on 9 July 2019 at 11:55 a.m. Eastern, under a subject line beginning “CNN;” although the linked article and the text beneath it are CNBC’s.14

That article records the Monday quotation and Tuesday’s narrowing of it side by side. It reports him telling reporters on the Monday: “I’m recused from that matter because one of the law firms that represented Epstein long ago was a firm I subsequently joined for a period of time,” and names the firm as Kirkland & Ellis, which it states had represented Epstein in 2008 and which Barr joined in 2009.1 The following day a Department official said that Barr “consulted with career ethics officials at the department, and concluded he did not have to recuse himself from the current prosecution in Manhattan”, and that “[d]ue to his prior association with Kirkland and Ellis, the Attorney General has and will remain recused from any retrospective review of the resolution of the earlier [Southern District of Florida] matter.”1

The recusal that stood was therefore narrow: it covered the Department’s retrospective review of the 2008 non-prosecution agreement, and not the prosecution then running in the Southern District of New York. The article’s own phrasing, em dashes and all, is that “Barr’s comment Monday seems to have referred — or does so now — to his continued recusal from the Justice Department’s internal probe into the non-prosecution of Epstein as signed off by Acosta.”1 That sentence concedes something worth noticing: the scope of the recusal as it was reported on Monday and its scope as the Department described it on Tuesday were not the same, and the article does not claim to know which Barr had meant.

The demand that he recuse more widely is in the release as a primary instrument. Senator Kamala D. Harris wrote to Barr and to Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen on 9 July 2019, asking both to “recuse yourselves from any and all matters related to his case in order to ensure and maintain the integrity of the criminal proceedings”, on the ground of their professional ties to Kirkland & Ellis.15 Her letter states that at the time he was nominated Barr “was Of Counsel at Kirkland & Ellis; a role he also held in 2009”, and records that at his confirmation hearing he had been asked by Senator Sasse about a full investigation into the Department’s handling of the 2008 matter and had answered: “Senator, I have to recuse myself from Kirkland & Ellis matters I am told, and I think Kirkland & Ellis was maybe involved in that case.”16 The letter then sets out the sequence the Department had just produced: “Yesterday, reports suggested that Attorney General Barr had recused from the current case, but earlier today a Justice Department official reportedly clarified that the attorney general would recuse only from matters related to Epstein’s prior case in Florida, not the case now pursued by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.”17

What the Department did with that letter is set out at congressional oversight and is not repeated here. The Executive Secretariat control sheet raised on it is the first sheet of the same filed run as the letter: it gives the addressee as “AG & DAG”, names the Justice Management Division as the action component, and carries the comment assigning the matter to that division’s ethics office.18

The sequence is worth stating plainly and without a motive attached. On 8 and 9 July 2019 the Attorney General’s position was that he was disqualified from looking backwards at the Department’s 2008 conduct. One month later he was leading the Department’s response to Epstein’s death in its custody. Both postures are documented, they are four and a half weeks apart, and this page does not assert any connection between them.

10 August 2019: the statement, and the sentence that was not issued

Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at approximately 6:30 a.m. on Saturday 10 August 2019, as the Bureau of Prisons recorded that morning; the Inspector General’s report records that he was found hanged in his assigned cell.24 The release holds the Department’s internal traffic of that morning, and it holds two different wordings of the Attorney General’s statement about it.

At 10:44 a.m. Eastern an official in the Office of Public Affairs circulated the Bureau of Prisons’ own press statement, headed “Inmate Death at the MCC New York”. Its first paragraph sets out the discovery and ends “The FBI is investigating the incident.” Two further paragraphs follow it, one giving Epstein’s age and pretrial status and one describing the facility, and the statement then runs onto the second sheet, where it closes by directing the reader to the Bureau’s own website.2 Three short exchanges follow in the thread, all of them on the first sheet: at 10:55 a.m. U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman wrote “Ok. Geoff”; at 11:06 a.m. an official of the Office of the Attorney General asked “Geoff. Is the FBI on scene yet?”; and at 11:57 a.m. Berman asked “Does the AG plan on issuing a statement?”2

The answer came back in the same minute, at 11:57:48 a.m. Eastern, over the words “Yes, the following:” and then the statement in quotation marks:2

I was appalled to learn that Jeffrey Epstein was found dead early this morning from an apparent suicide while in federal custody. Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered. I have ordered a full, thorough, and independent investigation be conducted into the circumstances of Mr. Epstein’s death.

Thirty-eight minutes later the Office of Public Affairs issued the statement to its public distribution list as release number AG 19-855, over the heading “STATEMENT FROM ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM P. BARR ON THE DEATH OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN” and the line “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” against “SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 2019”.19 The issued text reads:3

I was appalled to learn that Jeffrey Epstein was found dead early this morning from an apparent suicide while in federal custody. Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered. In addition to the FBI’s investigation, I have consulted with the Inspector General who is opening an investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Epstein’s death.

The first two sentences are identical. The third is not. The wording that went to the U.S. Attorney had the Attorney General ordering an investigation; the wording that went out had him consulting an Inspector General who was opening one. Both sheets carry an explicit +0000 offset on their date fields, so the order rests on the documents and not on an inference: 15:57:48 UTC for the first and 16:35:16 UTC for the second, thirty-eight minutes apart on the same morning.23 The issued wording was then reproduced verbatim in the Department’s own subscription bulletin and in the press coverage circulated back into the Bureau.2021 A later revision of the same newspaper report, filed years afterwards as a court exhibit, keeps the first two sentences as a quotation and turns the third into reported speech.22

No document read for this page records who changed that sentence, or why, and this page does not assert an answer. What the change does is remove a claim about the Attorney General’s authority: an Inspector General is independent of him, and the issued verb is the one that fits that relationship. The distinction matters downstream, because the version of this that circulated afterwards is closer to the withdrawn wording than to the issued one. The New York Times account of 23 August 2019, circulated inside the Southern District in its news clips under the headline “Barr Seized on Epstein Case as Doubts Mounted About Justice Dept.”,23 reports that Barr “directed the F.B.I. to investigate Mr. Epstein’s apparent suicide and the department’s inspector general to look for lapses in protocol”, an account the article attributes to “interviews with six people involved in the investigation into Mr. Epstein’s death, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal department discussions.”24 That is an anonymously sourced newspaper account of an internal direction. The Attorney General’s own issued instrument says something narrower, and so, as set out below, does the Inspector General’s report.

12 August 2019: New Orleans

Two days after the death Barr addressed the Fraternal Order of Police in New Orleans. The FBI’s Director’s AM News Briefing for Tuesday 13 August 2019 opens with it, under the headline “Barr ‘Appalled’ By Epstein Suicide In Jail, Vows To Find Anyone ‘Complicit’ In Crimes.” It carries the Associated Press’s rendering of the remarks: “I was appalled, and indeed the whole department was, and frankly angry to learn of the [Metropolitan Correctional Center’s[ failure to adequately secure this prisoner. … We are now learning of serious irregularities at this facility that are deeply concerning and demand a thorough investigation. The FBI and the office of inspector general are doing just that.” The second square bracket is printed as an opening bracket where a closing bracket belongs, and the ellipsis is the briefing’s own.25 The same briefing carries a clip of him saying: “Let me assure you that this case will continue on against anyone who was complicit with Epstein.”25

The briefing also carried an objection to those remarks up to the Director. Among the items it reproduced was a tweet by Jennifer Rubin, whom the sheet describes as a “Post conservative blogger”: “[e]very story and headline about Barr claiming irregularities at Bureau of Prisons facility should include ‘that reports to him.’”25 The Bureau of Prisons is a component of the Department of Justice, and the Inspector General’s report opens by saying so.4

Eight days later Epstein’s own counsel quoted both statements back at the government. A letter of 20 August 2019, signed by Michael C. Miller of Steptoe & Johnson LLP and naming Martin G. Weinberg, asked that evidence be preserved and made available because “[w]e intend to conduct our own investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Epstein’s death.” It quotes from the 10 August statement only one sentence of it, “Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered.” The sentence about the investigation is not carried at all, and the 12 August remark is rendered with one extra word, as “deeply concerning and that demand a thorough investigation.”26 Neither difference changes the sense. They are recorded because this is what happens to a sentence as it is passed along, and because the sentences the Attorney General actually issued are the ones this page relies on.

19 August 2019: the Bureau of Prisons director

On Monday 19 August 2019, nine days after the death, the Attorney General replaced the head of the Bureau of Prisons. The Wall Street Journal report of that day, by Sadie Gurman, headed “U.S. Prisons Chief Removed in Wake of Epstein Suicide”, was circulated in the Southern District’s news clips: “Hugh Hurwitz, who had been serving as the head of the federal prison system on a temporary basis since May 2018, was reassigned to a different post, Attorney General William Barr announced Monday.”6 The same report sets out the rest of the change: Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, “who led the agency from 1992 to 2003, will return to again be the BOP’s director, Mr. Barr said. He had appointed her to the post when he previously was attorney general in the 1990s.” Thomas Kane would return as the bureau’s second in command, and Hurwitz would return to his previous work on prisoner re-entry.27 The New York Times account of 23 August adds, on the authority of an unnamed person, that Barr had asked her “last Friday” to return.8

That appointment has one documented consequence in the release. On 19 November 2019 Hawk Sawyer told the Senate Judiciary Committee, in answer to Senator Lindsey Graham, that the FBI was “looking at criminal enterprise” in connection with the death. That afternoon an official of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York forwarded the report to an official of the Office of the Deputy Attorney General and copied a second official of the same office, opening “I wanted to alert you to testimony by Kathleen Hawk Sawyer”, quoted the exchange, and added: “To our knowledge, that is not accurate and could stir speculation. Is it possible that she could walk that back? Or correct it afterwards?”28 On the sheet, the phrases “or criminal enterprise at foot” in the senator’s question and “they are looking at criminal enterprise,” in the answer are printed in red; the surrounding text is black. The e-mail therefore marks in colour exactly the words the office wanted withdrawn.28

November 2019: his own account changes

On 22 November 2019 the Associated Press reported that Barr “said he initially had his own suspicions about financier Jeffrey Epstein’s death while behind bars at one of the most secure jails in America but came to conclude that his suicide was the result of ‘a perfect storm of screw-ups.’” It quoted him directly: “I can understand people who immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups.” The FBI’s Director’s AM News Briefing of Monday 25 November 2019 carried that report under the heading “Barr Acknowledges Being Initially Skeptical That Epstein Killed Himself.”7

The change in his account is the most substantial documented thing about his role, and it is not the phrase. On 10 August his issued statement said the death “raises serious questions that must be answered”. On 12 August he said the Department was “now learning of serious irregularities at this facility that are deeply concerning and demand a thorough investigation.” By 22 November his public account was that he had personally suspected something worse and had come to a settled explanation. The two federal investigations he had announced were still open; the Inspector General’s report would not be published for another three and a half years.4 The movement therefore ran in one direction, from a question demanding an answer to an explanation already reached, and it ran ahead of the instruments that were supposed to supply the answer. That is a sequence; this page does not supply a motive for it.

The same sheet of the same briefing carries the contrary position from inside his own Department. The next paragraph after the “perfect storm” report reproduces a Fox News item recording that the Bureau of Prisons director had testified the previous week that FBI investigators “are looking into whether a ‘criminal enterprise’ may have played a role.”7 So a single sheet of the FBI Director’s morning briefing carried, at the same time, the Attorney General’s settled explanation and his own appointee’s suggestion that a criminal enterprise was under investigation, six days after an official of his Department had written of the latter that “that is not accurate and could stir speculation.”728

What the Inspector General’s report says, and what it does not say

The Inspector General’s report on the Bureau’s custody of Epstein, report 23-085 of June 2023, is in the release in full: 128 sheets, whose pages run seven ahead of the report’s own printed folios.4 Its findings on the death and on the Bureau’s failures are set out at Death of Jeffrey Epstein and are not restated here. What belongs on this page is what it says about the Attorney General, which is nothing at all.

The strings “Barr” and “Attorney General” do not occur on any of the 128 sheets. The word General occurs 50 times across 32 of the sheets, in ten forms, of which the three commonest are general inmate, Inspector General and general population; not one of the fifty is Attorney General, in that form or in any damaged form searched for.5 The report gives its own account of how it began, twice, and the two forms say the same thing in different words, the executive summary’s being the shorter by four particulars. The fuller form, on the first sheet of Chapter 1, reads: “The OIG initiated this investigation upon the receipt of information from the BOP that on the morning of August 10, 2019, in the Metropolitan Correctional Center located in New York, New York (MCC New York), inmate Jeffery Epstein was found hanged in his assigned cell within the Special Housing Unit (SHU).”4 On the next sheet it states that it “conducted this investigation jointly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with the OIG’s investigative focus being the conduct of BOP personnel.”29 The phrase at the request does not occur anywhere in the report.5

Its only reference to the Department’s leadership is forward-looking. The recurrence of the same failures, it says, “does not excuse them and gives additional urgency to the need for DOJ and BOP leadership to address the chronic staffing, surveillance, safety and security, and related problems plaguing the BOP.”30 That is a recommendation about what the Department should now do. It is not a finding about what the Attorney General did.

This page does not assert that the Attorney General played no part in the Inspector General opening its investigation. It asserts something narrower and checkable: that the Inspector General’s own 128-sheet report does not say he did, that it attributes the opening to information received from the Bureau of Prisons, and that the widely repeated account of an Attorney General directing the Inspector General rests on his own words and on press reporting rather than on this instrument.

The sentence everyone quotes, and what the short version loses

The sentence most often taken from the report is reduced in press summaries to three nouns. In full, at the report’s conclusion, it reads:30

The combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures documented in this report all contributed to an environment in which arguably one of the BOP’s most notorious inmates was provided with the opportunity to take his own life, resulting in significant questions being asked about the circumstances of his death, how it could have been allowed to happen, and most importantly, depriving his numerous victims, many of whom were underage girls at the time of the alleged crimes, of their ability to seek justice through the criminal justice process.

That is the form on the executive summary’s last sheet, and it is the form quoted here.30 The sentence occurs three times in the report and in two forms, and that it occurs three times and only there is established by the search set out below.5 The executive summary has “one of the BOP’s most notorious inmates”.30 The introduction has “one of the most notorious inmates in BOP’s custody” and its occurrence stops at “take his own life”, continuing differently.31 The conclusions chapter has the same wording as the introduction and then continues as the executive summary does, except that it prints “how it could have been allowed to have happen” and gives the list of chronic problems without the words “safety and”.32 None of that is repaired here.

Read whole, the sentence is a finding about an environment and an opportunity. It says that an accumulation of failures produced conditions in which a prisoner was able to kill himself, and that the consequences included questions about the death and the loss of his victims’ route to justice. It is not a finding that named officials caused the death, and the three nouns on their own invite exactly that reading. A page that quoted only the nouns would be reporting a sharper claim than the report makes.

The Dalton School question

The single most circulated fact about Barr and Epstein is that Barr’s father hired Epstein to teach at the Dalton School. It should not be written as a fact, and this page does not write it as one.

The claim is in the release, as a newspaper assertion that the Department was circulating to itself. The New York Times article of 23 August 2019 states: “Even Mr. Barr had chance ties to Mr. Epstein: His old law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, had worked with Mr. Epstein on the Miami deal, and decades earlier, Mr. Barr’s father had hired Mr. Epstein to teach at Dalton, the elite private school in Manhattan.”8 Two copies of that article are in the release, both in news-clip digests circulated inside the Southern District and the Bureau.833

The qualification is also in the release, in the Department’s own working files. Forty-eight printings of the same page of an encyclopaedia article on Epstein are in the production, each carrying a printed browser timestamp in its header; the text layer of all forty-eight was read, the timestamps are not all of the same day, and the one copy opened at the image for this page also carries handwritten annotation above the header and underlining through the body. The printed paragraph reads: “Donald Barr, who served as the headmaster until June 1974, was known to have made several unconventional recruitments at the time, although it is unclear whether he had a direct role in hiring Epstein. Three months after Barr’s departure, Epstein began to teach at the school, despite his lack of credentials.”9 That is an encyclopaedia article and not a source this page relies on for the underlying facts; it is cited for what it is, which is a document in the release, in a file somebody was working from, carrying the qualification that the newspaper article omitted.

The dates are the reason the qualification exists, and they come from the encyclopaedia entries rather than from any document in the release. As those entries give them: Donald Barr’s headmastership of Dalton ran from 1964 to 1974; he announced his resignation in February 1974 and left at the end of that school year; Epstein began teaching at Dalton in September 1974. Those dates leave the question open rather than settling it in either direction. An appointment for September is ordinarily made in the preceding spring, which on these dates would have been while Barr was still in post, and the sentence the encyclopaedia entry preserves from the New York Times puts the question in exactly that window: “It is unclear whether Mr. Barr hired Mr. Epstein during that time,” the time being the months between the announcement of his resignation and his leaving.34 That newspaper article was not reached for this page; the sentence is quoted here as the encyclopaedia entry preserves it, inside the entry’s own citation to the article, and the transcription relied on is therefore the entry’s and not the newspaper’s.

The entry is not only the carrier of the qualification, and the page’s own account has to say so. The same entry asserts the hiring, in its own prose: “Toward the end of his tenure as headmaster, he hired college dropout Jeffrey Epstein, who would later be convicted of sex trafficking, as a math and science teacher.” That sentence sits between two sentences that carry references and carries none of its own.34 So the split this section has been drawing, of a newspaper asserting and an encyclopaedia qualifying, is cleaner than the record. One source does both, the assertion is its unsourced half, and a reader who opens it will find the cited authority stating what this page declines to state.

What a document establishing the claim would say, and the searches run for it

A document that settled this would name whoever appointed Epstein: a Dalton personnel or board record, a letter of appointment, a contemporaneous account naming the person who hired him, or testimony to that effect. Four searches were run for it and every returned page was read.

"Donald Barr" returns 52 pages in 52 documents; all 52 were read, and they are 47 printings of one encyclopaedia page, 4 sheets of the Maxwell proffer transcript and 1 image caption on a weblog printout.33 "headmaster" AND "Dalton" returns 54 pages in 54 documents; all 54 were read, and every one is a printing of that same encyclopaedia page, a sheet of the proffer transcript, or that weblog caption. "hired" AND "Dalton" returns 37 pages in 35 documents; all 37 were read, and not one names a hirer at Dalton. They are magazine and newspaper profiles of Epstein, two copies of the 23 August 2019 article quoted above, the proffer passage in which Maxwell says only that “he was hired from working at a private school whose name eludes me at this point” before her counsel supplies the school’s name,35 and two homographs, a seminary in Dalton, Pennsylvania and a nineteenth-century outlaw gang. "recruited" AND "Dalton" returns 23 pages in 23 documents; all 23 were read, and every use of the word concerns Epstein being recruited away from teaching into options trading, or the recruitment of victims, and none concerns his appointment at the school.

Two things in the material that was read are worth recording. The profiles do not agree on when the teaching began: of the 37 pages read for the third search, 2 place the start in 1973, 10 place it in 1974 and the remaining 25 give no year at all.33 And the only person any of them names as having tried to recruit Epstein out of Dalton is a parent of one of his pupils, not an administrator of the school.

So the position is this. A New York Times article of 23 August 2019 asserts that Donald Barr hired Epstein. A New York Times report of 12 July 2019, six weeks earlier, is quoted as saying it is unclear whether he did, and it is quoted, as set out above, inside an encyclopaedia entry that in its own prose asserts the hiring and gives no source for it. The later article states what the earlier one declined to state, and it is the later one that the Department circulated and that has been repeated since. No document read for this page establishes that Donald Barr hired Jeffrey Epstein, and this page does not assert that he did. That Donald Barr was William Barr’s father, and headmaster of Dalton, is not in dispute.

The Deputy Attorney General’s questions, 24 July 2025

The Dalton question was put, on the record and by the second-ranking officer of the Department, to the witness the Department chose to ask. In the recorded proffer of Ghislaine Maxwell taken over 24 and 25 July 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche asked about the two Barrs on four subjects, and every answer was negative. The transcript’s cover sheet gives the date and the appearances, and its last sheet records that the interview would continue the following day.3637

He began: “Do you know someone named Donald Barr?” Maxwell answered: “No.” He then had to identify the man to her: “He is — I can represent to you, was a former headmaster of the Dalton School, which you mentioned earlier.”10 Earlier in the same proffer Maxwell had said of Epstein that “he was hired from working at a private school whose name eludes me at this point,” and it was her own counsel who supplied “Dalton.”35

He asked next about Donald Barr’s novel: “Do you remember any conversations with Epstein about a book that Mr. Barr wrote called Space Relations?” Answer: “I’ve never heard of that.” “About aliens and sex?” Answer: “Okay. No.”11 He turned then to the son: “have you ever met the former Attorney General of the United States Bill Barr?” Answer: “No.” “Do you remember whether Mr. Epstein knew him or whether his name ever came up in conversations you had with Mr. Epstein?” Answer: “I don’t recall any.”11 And finally, on the next sheet: “did you ever hear any — from Mr. Epstein or anybody else — that Bill Barr had any role in Mr. Epstein getting a good plea deal in Florida, or any role in that process with Mr. Acosta?” Answer: “I never heard that.”12

Two things about that exchange are worth keeping separate. The questions show what the Department itself thought worth asking in 2025: the Dalton connection, the father’s book, any acquaintance between Epstein and Barr, and any role by Barr in the 2008 plea agreement. The answers show that the witness put forward no support for any of them. A denial by a convicted witness is not proof of a negative, and this page does not treat it as one; it is one recorded answer, from one person, to a question the Department asked.

What was searched, and what came back

Every count below is over the full-text index, using FTS5 phrase queries. Page counts are pages; document counts are distinct identifiers. Identifier prefixes, not the dataset column, were used for scope.

QueryPagesDocumentsWhat the returns are
"William Barr"421223Sender-field head in 1 of the 22313
"William P. Barr"11282
"Attorney General Barr"213118
"Bill Barr"10664
"Donald Barr"525247 encyclopaedia printings, 4 proffer transcript sheets, 1 blog image caption33
"Barr" AND "Dalton"6460By document: 48 encyclopaedia printings, 4 proffer transcript documents, 2 copies of one newspaper article, 1 blog caption, 5 homographs33
"headmaster" AND "Dalton"5454All 54 read; every one an encyclopaedia printing, a proffer sheet or the weblog caption
"hired" AND "Dalton"3735All 37 read; none names a hirer at Dalton
"recruited" AND "Dalton"2323All 23 read; none concerns the appointment at the school
"Dalton School"386316Not enumerated; no characterisation offered
"Space Relations"44One passage of the proffer, in two printings each produced twice33
"Hawk Sawyer"7722
"Kathleen Hawk Sawyer"7322
"Hugh Hurwitz" AND "Barr"2414
"perfect storm of screw-ups"1312
"appalled to learn that Jeffrey Epstein"88
"I have ordered a full, thorough, and independent investigation"22Both are copies of the one internal thread2
"I have consulted with the Inspector General who is opening an investigation"33The issued release and two reproductions of it32021
"Does the AG plan on issuing a statement"33Three sheets of the one thread2
"serious irregularities at this facility"2724
"raises serious questions that must be answered"3529
"Barr" AND "recused"2318
"Barr" AND "recusal"76
"Barr" AND "recuse"158
"Office of Professional Responsibility" AND "Barr"87
"Rosen" AND "recuse"42

Office-scoped and entity-scoped queries were run in preference to the personal name, because the personal name returns press. "Hawk Sawyer", "Kathleen Hawk Sawyer", "Hugh Hurwitz", "Director of the Bureau of Prisons" (63 pages, 21 documents), "Acting Director" (264 pages, 171 documents), "Michael Horowitz" (74 pages, 67 documents), "Fraternal Order of Police" (13 pages, 10 documents) and "Office of Professional Responsibility" conjoined with "Barr" were the productive forms.38 The Executive Secretariat control sheets addressed “AG” and “AG & DAG”, which are the Department’s own routing record for correspondence to the Attorney General, are enumerated and read at congressional oversight and were used here only for the Harris letter’s own text.

Three queries were run and rejected, and none of the three was enumerated, so nothing is said here about what their returns contain. "perfect storm" returns 123 pages across 114 documents; the form used on this page is the whole phrase, which returns 13 pages in 12 documents, and the remaining 110 pages were not read and are not characterised. "Barr" alone returns 2,246 pages, and a count over it cannot be attributed to this subject: three contributors to it were identified and checked, being his father, a Palm Beach property owner of the same surname, and at least one case of the extraction damaging a different word into this one. "recused" alone returns 453 pages across 318 documents, which were not read; the conjoined forms in the table above are what this page relies on. Two further searches for damaged spellings returned nothing: the three measured single-substitution forms of "William Barr" ("Williarn Barr", "Wi1liam Barr", "Wil1iam Barr") each return zero pages, and no human-variant form of the name returns a document.39

The searches supporting the absence claim about the Inspector General’s report are set out in its own footnote, and they were run over the text of all 128 sheets rather than through the index, with whitespace normalised so that a phrase broken across a line break is still matched.5

Footnotes

  1. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, circulating a CNBC article of 9 July 2019. Every quotation taken from this document in the body prose is on filed p.2, which is the pin here. The sender’s name in the signature block on that sheet is barred; beneath the bar the sheet prints, on three lines, the words Public Affairs, then United States Department of Justice, then U.S. Attorney’s Office and Southern District of New York separated by a vertical rule, with a further bar below. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00018398 p.2 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Office of Public Affairs to “Berman, Geoffrey (USANYS)” and an official of the Office of the Attorney General, dated “Sat, 10 Aug 2019 15:57:48 +0000”, carrying the statement text under the words “Yes, the following:” and beneath it the quoted chain of 11:57 a.m., 11:06 a.m., 10:55 a.m. and 10:44 a.m. Every string quoted from this document here is on filed p.1, which is the pin. The From, To, Cc and Subject fields are barred apart from the name in the To line and the office tags “(OPA)” and “(OAG)”; the date field is printed, and the subject reads “RE:” with the remainder barred. One further small bar sits below the 11:06 a.m. message. The Bureau’s press statement, reproduced inside the 10:44 a.m. message, runs to a heading and three paragraphs on filed p.1 and closes at the head of filed p.2 with the single line “Additional information about the Federal Bureau of Prisons can be found at www.bop.gov.” Beneath that line, and set in a serif face that the statement itself is not set in, stands a signature block whose name is barred and which prints the words Director, Office of Public Affairs and U.S. Department of Justice; that block is the circulating official’s own sign-off and not part of the Bureau’s statement. The change of face is the ground on which the statement’s end is placed here, and it is the reason the three paragraphs are read as statement rather than as covering text. Both sheets read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00088592 p.1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00088592 p.2. A second copy of the same thread, with a reply “Thanks. Geoff” added at “Sat, 10 Aug 2019 16:15:00 +0000”, is at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00077545 p.1, and the 15:56:37 UTC message alone at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00088591 p.1 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  3. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, release AG 19-855. The quotation of the statement, the words “WASHINGTON” and “issued the following statement” above it, and the release number below it are all on filed p.2, which is the pin here. The statement opens with a curly left double quotation mark and closes with a straight one. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00027258 p.2 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. DOJ Office of the Inspector General, Investigation and Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Custody, Care, and Supervision of Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, New York, report 23-085, June 2023, Investigations Division. Page numbers for this report are the pages of the filed copy as a reader opens it, which run seven ahead of the report’s own printed folios; filed p.8 carries folio 1, confirmed at the image on that sheet. Two of the strings quoted from this document here are on filed p.8, the first sheet of Chapter 1, which is the pin: the account of how the investigation began, and the words about the Bureau being a component of the Department. The executive summary, on filed p.2, carries a shorter form of the same account. The two differ in four particulars and in nothing else: it has “upon receipt” where p.8 has “upon the receipt”; “on August 10, 2019” where p.8 has “on the morning of August 10, 2019”; “in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York” where p.8 has “located in New York”; and “Epstein was found hanged” where p.8 has “inmate Jeffery Epstein was found hanged”. The substance is identical and nothing on this page turns on the difference. Filed p.2 is set in two narrow columns, which is the same column width that breaks combination of negligence across a line on filed p.5 and is the mechanism the search note describes. Filed p.8 read at the image at 400 dpi and filed p.2 at 300 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01656708 p.8 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01656708 p.2 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  5. Method for the statements about what this report does not contain. The text of all 128 sheets of https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01656708 was read out of the index row by row and searched with whitespace normalised to single spaces and without regard to case, so that a phrase broken across a line break is still matched. Results: Barr 0 occurrences; Attorney General 0; Horowitz 0; at the request 0; and, for damaged spellings, 8arr, Barn, Bair, Ban as a whole word and B a r r with any spacing, 0 each. Attorney occurs 105 times on 35 sheets and every occurrence was inspected in context: none is Attorney General, and the forms found are U.S. Attorney's Office and its damaged variants, attorney conference room and attorney conference area, attorney visit and attorney logs, attorney-client privilege, supervisory staff attorney, and plain attorney and attorneys. Assistant United States Attorney was searched for separately and occurs zero times, as do Assistant U.S. Attorney and AUSA. General occurs 50 times on 32 sheets in ten forms: general inmate 14, Inspector General 11, general population 9, generally 6, General Housing 4, general practice 2, and one each of general principles, general sense (filed p.15), general requirements (p.16) and general administrative (p.51). The list is exhaustive and sums to 50; none of the fifty is Attorney General, which is the claim the enumeration exists to support. BOP leadership occurs on three sheets, filed pp.5, 11 and 105, and combination of negligence on the same three. The raw, unnormalised search finds BOP leadership on all three but combination of negligence on only two of them, pp.11 and 105, because the executive summary’s narrow column breaks that phrase across a line after “combination of”; that is why the normalised method is the one reported. A disconfirming document for the claim in the text would be a sheet of this report naming the Attorney General, or recording a direction from the Department’s leadership to open the investigation; neither was located, and the claim is bounded to this report and not to the world. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  6. A news-clip digest circulated inside the Southern District of New York on the evening of 19 August 2019, its covering e-mail naming the digest and that date on the first sheet. The digest reproduces a Wall Street Journal report whose headline “U.S. Prisons Chief Removed in Wake of Epstein Suicide”, byline “By Sadie Gurman”, date “8/19/19” and the sentence about the reassignment quoted here are all on filed p.23, which is the pin; the headline also appears in the digest’s contents list on filed p.3. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00077515 p.23. A near-identical second digest carries the same article at the same sheet of its own run, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00092932 p.23 ↩ ↩2

  7. An FBI Public Affairs Director’s morning news briefing for Monday 25 November 2019, whose title block and timestamp are at the head of its first sheet. Filed p.5, which is the pin, carries the item headed “Barr Acknowledges Being Initially Skeptical That Epstein Killed Himself”, reporting the Associated Press of 22 November 2019, and the Fox News item in the next paragraph reporting the Senate testimony; every string quoted from this document here is on that sheet. The material above and below that block on the sheet is barred. The extraction damages the surname in the item heading, so a text-layer search for the heading as printed returns nothing; the image carries it, and the image is the authority. The briefing summarises press reporting and is not a Bureau finding. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00161102 p.5. The same Associated Press report reached the Bureau of Prisons separately in its own clips digest, which conspiracy theories cites at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00041963 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  8. A news-clip digest circulated inside the Southern District of New York on 23 August 2019, reproducing a New York Times report of the same day by Katie Benner. Both quotations taken from it here, the sentence about Dalton and the words “last Friday” in the account of the approach to Hawk Sawyer, are on filed p.14, which is the pin. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00069870 p.14. A second copy of the same article, circulated the same evening, carries the Dalton sentence at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00020787 p.2 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  9. One of forty-eight printings in the release of the same page of an encyclopaedia article on Jeffrey Epstein, this copy carrying a printed browser timestamp of 19 May 2022 in its header, handwritten annotation above that header, and pencil or ink underlining through the body. The extraction damages the date part of that timestamp, so it is given here from the image. The paragraph quoted here is the one headed “Teaching” and is on filed p.1, which is the pin; the printed reference markers within it are omitted from the quotation. This is an encyclopaedia article; it is cited here as a document in the release and not as authority for anything it asserts. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00265663 p.1 ↩ ↩2

  10. The same transcript, filed p.191 carrying the printed line “Page 191”, lines 20 to 25, which carry every string quoted from that sheet here. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02846680 p.191 ↩ ↩2

  11. The same transcript, filed p.192 carrying the printed line “Page 192”, lines 2 to 16, which carry every string quoted from that sheet here. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02846680 p.192 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  12. The same transcript, filed p.193 carrying the printed line “Page 193”, lines 14 to 20, which carry every string quoted from that sheet here. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02846680 p.193 ↩ ↩2

  13. Measured with scripts/act_rate.py '"William Barr"' Barr, which classifies the first sheet of every document matching the phrase: 223 documents, the name at the head of the sender field on 1, in a recipient field only on 1, at the head of a header-less authored sheet on 9, and neither on 212. The tool’s positive control passes. The figure is reported here as a fact about the instrument through which the office speaks and not as a measure of whether the subject acted; the same test returns zero for institutions that act entirely on paper. Two traps met in taking this measurement are recorded so a reader reproducing it gets the same number: the FTS5 phrase must reach the script with its quotation marks intact, since an unquoted William Barr is a token conjunction and returns 297 documents rather than 223; and the name key after the phrase is required, since with no key the tool’s key pattern is empty, matches every sender field, and returns a meaningless 117, or 136 if the quotation marks are dropped as well. ↩ ↩2

  14. The first sheet of the same two-sheet run, which carries the date field “Tue, 09 Jul 2019 15:55:02 +0000”, the importance field “High”, the subject line “CNN; Attorney General Bill Barr will not recuse himself from Jeffrey Epstein child sex prosecution”, the article’s own headline in the same words, and the line “PUBLISHED 10 MIN AGO”. The From, To and Cc fields are barred as a single block; the subject, date and importance fields are printed. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00018398 p.1 ↩

  15. Senator Kamala D. Harris, on United States Senate letterhead, dated 9 July 2019, addressed in two blocks: the left naming William Barr as Attorney General and the right naming Jeffrey A. Rosen as Deputy Attorney General, each above the Department’s Pennsylvania Avenue address. It opens “Dear Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosen” and requests “that you recuse yourselves from any and all matters related to his case in order to ensure and maintain the integrity of the criminal proceedings.” Both strings are on filed p.2, which is the pin. The letter’s own folios run one behind the filed copy, so its folio 1 is filed p.2. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00175169 p.2 ↩

  16. The same letter, filed p.3, carrying its folio 2. Every string quoted here is on that sheet: “Prior to joining the Trump administration, both Attorney General Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosen practiced at Kirkland & Ellis, the firm responsible for negotiating Epstein’s 2008 plea deal. At the time he was nominated to lead the Justice Department, Attorney General Barr was Of Counsel at Kirkland & Ellis; a role he also held in 2009.” The confirmation-hearing exchange is quoted on the same sheet, the letter’s own note 14 giving its source as “Nomination of the Honorable William Pelham Barr to be Attorney General of the United States: Hearing Before the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, 116th Cong (2019).” Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00175169 p.3 ↩

  17. The same letter, filed p.4, carrying its folio 3. The sentence quoted here is on that sheet and the word “not” in it is printed in italics; the letter’s two printed footnote markers within that sentence are omitted from the quotation. The sheet is signed in ink above two printed lines naming Kamala D. Harris and, beneath, United States Senator. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00175169 p.4 ↩

  18. Department of Justice Executive Secretariat control sheet, filed p.1 of the same run as the letter, which is the pin. It carries workflow ID 4293737, date of document 7/9/2019, date received and date assigned 7/12/2019, due date 7/26/2019, mail type “Congressional Priority”, the From block naming the Honorable Kamala Harris of the United States Senate, the To line “AG & DAG”, the action component “JMD” with the action requested “Prepare response for AAG/OLA signature.”, the info component “OAG, ODAG, CRM, EOUSA, FBI, OLA, OPR”, and the comment “07/12/2019: Per OLA (”, a bar, ”), assign to JMD/Ethics.” The file code line is blank and the EXECSEC POC value is barred. The same sheet is enumerated with the rest of the Epstein correspondence at congressional oversight. Read at the image at 300 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00175169 p.1 ↩

  19. The first sheet of the same two-sheet run, which carries the date field “Sat, 10 Aug 2019 16:35:16 +0000”, the subject line, the heading “STATEMENT FROM ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM P. BARR ON THE DEATH OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN”, the line “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” and, set against it, the date line quoted in the body. The recipient field is barred; the sender, subject and date fields are printed. The extraction of this sheet renders the day of that date line as “to”; the image prints the numerals, and the image is the authority. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00027258 p.1 ↩

  20. A forward of the Department’s subscription bulletin, dated “Sat, 10 Aug 2019 17:59:14 +0000”, importance “Normal”, subject “Fwd: U.S. Department of Justice DOJ Press Releases & News Update”, reproducing the issued wording in full under the heading “Statement from Attorney General William P. Barr on the Death of Jeffrey Epstein” over the line “Attorney General William P. Barr issued the following statement:”. The quoted message above it reads “FYSA… we’ve gotten a good number of calls on this, will continue to refer to DOJ statement:”. The From and To block is barred as a single block, as are the sender of the quoted message and one recipient line; the subject, date and importance fields are printed. One note for anyone re-checking this footnote against the text layer: the extraction of this sheet renders the middle initial as an R where the image prints P, so a substring search for the line about the statement matches the second sheet and not this one. The image of this sheet carries it, and the image is the authority. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00165290 p.1 ↩ ↩2

  21. A printout, browser-dated 8/10/2019, of a New York Times report headed “Jeffrey Epstein Dead in Suicide at Manhattan Jail, Officials Say”, bylined “By William K. Rashbaum, Benjamin Weiser and Michael Gold” and dated “Aug. 10, 2019”, which reproduces the issued wording of the statement in full. Every string quoted from this document here is on filed p.1, which is the pin. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00040076 p.1 ↩ ↩2

  22. A later revision of the same story, filed as an exhibit in unrelated litigation under the headline “Jeffrey Epstein Dead in Suicide at Jail, Spurring Inquiries”, which carries only the first two sentences of the statement as a quotation and renders the third as reported speech: “In addition to the F.B.I., the Inspector General, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, will open an investigation into Mr. Epstein’s death, Mr. Barr said.” That sentence is on filed p.2, which is the pin. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02810325 p.2 ↩

  23. The same digest, filed p.12, which is the pin and which carries the article’s headline as quoted here, together with its byline, its date and its first paragraph; it is one sheet before filed p.13, which carries the passage about directing the FBI and the inspector general, and two sheets before filed p.14, which carries the Dalton sentence. The digest’s first sheet carries the covering e-mail, whose subject line and repeated heading name the digest and the date, Friday 23 August 2019, and whose date field is timed at 20:41:55 UTC that evening. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00069870 p.12 ↩

  24. The same digest, filed p.13, which carries both quotations taken from it here: the sentence about directing the FBI and the inspector general, and the article’s statement of its own sourcing. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00069870 p.13 ↩

  25. An FBI Public Affairs Director’s morning news briefing for Tuesday 13 August 2019, whose title block and timestamp are at the head of filed p.1 and whose opening item, headed “Barr ‘Appalled’ By Epstein Suicide In Jail, Vows To Find Anyone ‘Complicit’ In Crimes”, carries every quotation taken from it here on that same sheet, which is the pin. The extraction damages the surname in that heading, so a text-layer search for it as printed returns nothing; the image carries it, and the image is the authority. On the sheet the two words inside that heading are set in double quotation marks; they are set as single marks in the body above because the whole heading is quoted there. The tweet quoted in the body sits on the same sheet, in a paragraph that reproduces three tweets in turn, and the sheet’s own words for it are “Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin tweeted”; the paragraph gives the word “journalist” to a different person in the next clause, which is why her own characterisation and not that one is used above. The briefing summarises broadcast and wire coverage and is not a Bureau finding. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00161043 p.1 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  26. Letter of 20 August 2019. Filed p.2, which is the pin, carries the printed line “Page 2”, the two Barr quotations, the sentence “We intend to conduct our own investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Epstein’s death”, and, beneath an ink signature, printed blocks naming Michael C. Miller of Steptoe & Johnson LLP and, below that, Martin G. Weinberg of Martin G. Weinberg, P.C. Read at the image at 600 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00019407 p.2. Fourteen printings of this sheet of the letter are in the release: a phrase search for We intend to conduct our own investigation into the circumstances and a phrase search for Requested Evidence be made available to counsel each return the same fourteen documents, and in every one the sheet is p.2. All fourteen carry both of the Barr quotations discussed above on that sheet, checked in the text layer of each. In the text layer six of the fourteen begin the sheet a line later than the other eight, which has not been checked at the image and is as likely to be an extraction artefact as a difference in the printings; nothing on this page rests on it. The other thirteen are https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00019409, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00019411, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00079035, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00079037, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00079039, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00084963, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00084965, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00084967, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00105900, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00105902, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00106078, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00106080 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00106082 ↩

  27. The same report, continuing on the next sheet of the same digest, which carries the sentences about Hawk Sawyer, Kane and Hurwitz quoted here. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00077515 p.24 ↩

  28. E-mail of “Tue, 19 Nov 2019 17:31:53 +0000”, subject “FYI”, forwarding a message sent at 12:30 p.m. the same day from an official of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which quotes the Senate exchange and asks the question set out above. On the sheet that inner message carries one recipient in its To line and one in its Cc line, each a barred name followed by the printed office tag “(ODAG)”, so one official of the Office of the Deputy Attorney General was addressed and one was copied; the outer forward above it carries two recipients, both tagged “(USANYS)”. Every string quoted from this document here is on filed p.1, which is the pin. All From, To and Cc names and addresses are barred and the office tags are printed; the subject, dates and body are printed, and two further small bars sit in the body where a salutation and a sign-off would be. The two phrases named in the text are printed in red on the sheet and the rest of the body in black. The sheet prints the senator’s forename as “Lindsay”. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00075688 p.1 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  29. The same report, filed p.9, carrying folio 2, the second sheet of Chapter 1, which is the pin and which carries the sentence about conducting the investigation jointly with the FBI as quoted here, together with the statement that “The FBI determined that there was no criminality pertaining to how Epstein had died.” Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01656708 p.9 ↩

  30. The same report, filed p.5, carrying folio iv, the last sheet of the executive summary, under the heading “Conclusion and Recommendations”. Both quotations taken from this sheet here are on it, and the sheet gives the list of chronic problems as “staffing, surveillance, safety and security, and related problems”. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01656708 p.5 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  31. The same report, filed p.11, carrying folio 4, the last sheet of Chapter 1. Both strings quoted from this sheet here are on it: “one of the most notorious inmates in BOP’s custody” and “take his own life”, after which this occurrence of the sentence ends and the paragraph continues “The BOP’s failures are troubling not only because the BOP did not adequately safeguard an individual in its custody, but also because they led to questions about the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death and effectively deprived Epstein’s numerous victims of the opportunity to seek justice through the criminal justice process.” Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01656708 p.11 ↩

  32. The same report, filed p.105, carrying folio 98, the fifth sheet of Chapter 7. Every string quoted from this sheet here is on it: “one of the most notorious inmates in BOP’s custody”, “how it could have been allowed to have happen”, and the list of chronic problems, which this sheet gives without the two words the executive summary has. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01656708 p.105 ↩

  33. Enumeration behind the Dalton rows of the table. "Donald Barr" returns 52 pages in 52 documents and the context of all 52 was read: 47 are printings of the same encyclopaedia page, 4 are sheets of the Maxwell proffer transcript, being two transcripts each produced twice, and 1 is an image caption on a weblog printout at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01652813 p.4. "Barr" AND "Dalton" returns 64 pages in 60 documents: the same 4 proffer sheets, the same 1 caption, 2 copies of the New York Times article of 23 August 2019, 48 encyclopaedia printings, the extra one being a copy whose extraction damages the surname to Baty, and 5 homographs, which are four Palm Beach property-tax spreadsheets and one newspaper article in which the extraction has damaged the name of a college guide to Barr followed by an equals sign. The four spreadsheets are a trap worth naming: each holds an entire spreadsheet in a single index row, so any two strings anywhere in it appear to co-occur, and what co-occurs here is one property owner recorded under the surname Barr with the forename Myer and another recorded under the surname Dalton with the forename William. Neither is this subject and neither is the school. The homographs are subtracted from every figure used in the text. At page level the same query returns 64 pages: 48 encyclopaedia pages, 4 proffer sheets, 2 newspaper pages, 1 caption and 9 homograph pages, the last being two pages in each of the four spreadsheets and one in the damaged article. A phrase search for the novel’s title returns 4 pages in 4 documents. Those four are the same passage of the same proffer: the full transcript and a condensed printing of it, each produced twice, once under an EFTA identifier and once under a DOJ-OGR identifier. The year breakdown given in the text is over the 37 pages returned by "hired" AND "Dalton", tested by searching each page’s text for the strings 1973 and 1974: 2 pages carry 1973 and not 1974, 10 carry 1974 and not 1973, none carries both, and 25 carry neither. 2 + 10 + 0 + 25 = 37. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  34. Encyclopaedia entry on Donald Barr, consulted 11 September 2026; its source wikitext was read directly, which is how the attributions below were established. The entry carries both halves of the Dalton question and they are unevenly sourced. It asserts the hiring in its own prose — “Toward the end of his tenure as headmaster, he hired college dropout Jeffrey Epstein, who would later be convicted of sex trafficking, as a math and science teacher” — and that sentence carries no reference marker at all, although the sentences on either side of it do. Of those: the headmastership, given as 1964 to 1974, is attributed to a New York Times report of 20 February 1974 by Gene I. Maeroff; “[i]n February 1974, Barr announced his resignation at the end of the school year” is attributed to that report and also to a New York Times report of 12 July 2019 by Mike Baker and Amy Julia Harris; and “Epstein began working at Dalton in September 1974” is attributed to the Baker and Harris report and to a Yahoo Finance piece. The qualification is not a sentence of the entry at all. It is preserved word for word inside the entry’s citation to the Baker and Harris report, in that citation’s quotation field, which reads in part: “In February 1974, Mr. Barr had announced that he was resigning as headmaster, […] but that he would stay on until the end of the school year. It is unclear whether Mr. Barr hired Mr. Epstein during that time.” The bracketed ellipsis is the entry’s. The newspaper article itself was not reached for this page, so the transcription relied on is the encyclopaedia’s rather than the newspaper’s, which is one remove and is stated as such. An encyclopaedia entry is not a primary source; nothing on this page rests on it beyond the attributions and this page’s account of what it says. ↩ ↩2

  35. Recorded proffer of Ghislaine Maxwell, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche presiding, transcript by Magna Legal Services. Filed p.54, which is the pin, carries the printed line “Page 54” and both strings quoted here: “So I — I know that he was hired from working at a private school whose name eludes me at this point.” and, on the next line, “LEAH SAFFIAN: Dalton.” Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02846680 p.54. The same transcript is also produced as https://epstein-data.com/DOJ-OGR-00022393 One note covering every quotation from this transcript on this page: each was taken from the image, and none of them can be confirmed by a contiguous substring search of the text layer, because the extraction interleaves each sheet’s printed line numbers with the words. That is a property of the extraction and not a doubt about the quotations. ↩ ↩2

  36. The same transcript, filed p.1, which is the pin. The cover sheet is headed “United States Department of Justice” over “INTERVIEW OF: GHISLAINE MAXWELL” and “DATE: July 24, 2025”, and lists the appearances: for the United States, Todd Blanche as Deputy Attorney General, Diego Pestana as Acting Associate Deputy Attorney General, Spencer Horn as FBI Special Agent and Mark Beard as Deputy U.S. Marshal; for Ghislaine Maxwell, David Markus, Leah Saffian and Melissa Madrigal. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02846680 p.1 ↩

  37. The same transcript, filed p.214, the last sheet of the day’s record, which is the pin. It closes: “This will conclude the recorded proffer interview for Thursday, July 24th. We will continue tomorrow, Friday, July 25th. The time is 3:34.” The line beneath reads “(Interview concluded at 3:34 p.m.)”. Read at the image at 400 dpi. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02846680 p.214 ↩

  38. The four counts given inline in that sentence were run the same way as the rows of the table above: FTS5 phrase queries against the full-text index, pages counted as matching rows and documents as distinct identifiers, with no LIMIT and no scope by the dataset column. "Director of the Bureau of Prisons" 63 pages in 21 documents; "Acting Director" 264 pages in 171 documents; "Michael Horowitz" 74 pages in 67 documents; "Fraternal Order of Police" 13 pages in 10 documents. None of the four was enumerated, and nothing is said on this page about what their returns contain; they are given as the measure of which query forms were productive, and the two that this page actually relies on for its findings are cited to the documents themselves elsewhere. ↩

  39. Damaged-spelling coverage. scripts/ocr_variants.py "William Barr" --count generates three forms from measured glyph pairs, Williarn Barr, Wi1liam Barr and Wil1iam Barr, and each returns 0 pages against a baseline of 421. scripts/name_forms.py "William Barr" reports that no human-variant form returns a document. The generator applies one substitution at a time and cannot reach multi-edit damage; the residual is therefore not zero, and the news-clip digests read for this page do contain the extraction’s damaged renderings of the surname, which is why no count on this page is scoped by the bare surname. ↩

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