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New Delhi, 1 February. India on Friday strongly condemned any mention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an email message on the ‘so-called’ Epstein files, calling it ‘salacious talk’ from a ‘convicted criminal’ which should be completely ignored. The matter came to light after the US Justice Department released a huge batch of files to its investigation into financier Jeffrey Epstein, including more than three million pages of records, 2,000 videos and 180,000 photographs.

Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy American financier, died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges involving underage girls. His death was officially ruled a suicide. “We have seen reports of an email message from the so-called Epstein files which mentions the Prime Minister and his visit to Israel,” Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement issued on Saturday evening to ‘clarify some reports’.

The MEA statement further said, “Apart from the Prime Minister’s official visit to Israel in July 2017, the rest of the emails are the nonsense of a convicted criminal, which should be completely ignored.” On Friday, the US Justice Department began releasing millions of records to the investigation and trials of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and said it had completed an unprecedented review ordered under a new transparency law signed by President Donald Trump.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch told reporters that the department is releasing more than three million pages of material, including more than 2,000 videos and nearly 180,000 photographs, as part of compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law on November 19, 2025. “In total, this means the Department has released approximately 3.5 million pages in compliance with this act,” Blanch said at a press conference at the Justice Department.

Blanch said the review involved more than 500 lawyers and professionals across multiple divisions, including the FBI and several U.S. attorneys’ offices. He said the teams met ‘twice a day, sometimes more’ for about 75 days to complete the work. Blanch said the department initially identified more than six million pages as potentially answerable, but released fewer records after applying legal and privacy standards. “We made the mistake of collecting too much,” he said, adding that the final production was small because of the required allowances.