Officers were tasked with guarding the building and personnel after some social media comments called for protests or other methods to secure the files if names are scrubbed from the documents.

The Epstein files—the government’s data and physical evidence related to the Epstein investigation—have everyone all fired up, including Epstein’s brother, Mark. On Tuesday, right before the House and Senate passed a bill to compel the Department of Justice to release the cache, Mark Epstein claimed in an interview with NewsNation that the head of the FBI, Kash Patel, was leading a “coverup” of the Epstein files. He added that a “pretty good source” told him the files were being scrubbed of any “Republican names” in “Winchester”—the Virginia city where the FBI’s main records-processing facility is located.

There’s no evidence to back up any of Mark Epstein’s allegations. But his remarks were shared in a Reddit post that day that led a handful of commenters to suggest if the files are being sanitized then perhaps people should protest outside of the bureau’s Winchester building, known as the Central Records Complex, where the Epstein files were processed earlier this year and are stored. Another commenter asked “at what point do we go from protesting to the next logical progression?” Elsewhere on social media, some people suggested that they should go and get the Epstein files themselves.

According to two people familiar with the FBI’s operations who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the media, the bureau interpreted the comments as potentially threatening and took action. The FBI sent its uniformed police officers to the Central Records Complex to guard the facility. The officers, who normally patrol the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, were also assigned to protect top officials and staff at the Virginia facility, the people familiar said.

For years, the polarizing political climate has led to serious threats against the FBI as well as federal judges and, as my colleagues and I recently reported, personnel at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The comments on Reddit don’t rise to that level but the FBI clearly isn’t taking chances.

An FBI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Review and Redact

I want to circle back to Mark Epstein’s comments about Winchester, Virginia. There’s a Freedom of Information Act angle to this. Earlier this year, I reported that FBI special agents from the New York and Washington, DC field offices, along with staff from the FBI’s FOIA office and the FBI’s Enterprise Vetting Center, which handles background checks, were holed up at the Central Records Complex in Winchester and another building a few miles away reviewing the Epstein files. The sprawling 256,000 square-foot building houses two billion pages of physical FBI records. That’s the same facility where FOIA requests are processed.

FBI agents pulled all-nighters reviewing every single Epstein-related document and determining what could be released and what information needed to be redacted using FOIA’s nine exemptions as a guide. That included a mountain of material accumulated by the FBI over nearly two decades, including grand jury testimony, prosecutors’ case files, as well as tens of thousands of pages of the bureau’s own investigative files on Epstein.

When their review of the files was completed in May, copies of the processed records were sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi. A couple of months later, the DOJ and FBI issued a joint statement that said the Epstein files total more than 300 gigabytes and the agencies concluded that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” The people familiar with the matter said FBI personnel so far have not been asked to conduct a second review of the Epstein files.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by Congress on Tuesday calls for the DOJ to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the DOJ's possession that relate to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein” in a “searchable and downloadable format,” within 30 days. The legislation, which President Donald Trump signed on Wednesday, authorizes the DOJ to temporarily withhold information if the release would interfere with an active federal investigation.

Last week, after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released thousands of Epstein’s emails it secured from his estate, Trump called on Bondi to investigate links between Epstein, JPMorgan Chase … Co., and prominent Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton. Trump’s directive came hours after the committee’s Democrats released emails from the same trove that showed Epstein sent an email to a reporter in 2019 that said Trump “knew about the girls,” which the president has denied.