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Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service coming to you live from London.

I'm Julian Warwick.

So it's deadline day in the United States, the day when the Department of Justice in Washington

is legally obliged to release highly anticipated documents about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

And that release has begun to happen in the last few minutes.

It's worth saying the path to today's deadline has not been smooth.

Prior to winning the presidential election last November,

Donald Trump said he would publish all the Epstein files,

but then he was accused of dragging his feet on the subject,

going as far as describing calls for their release as a Democrat hoax.

But his hand was forced when Congress passed a bill with Republican support,

requiring the Justice Department to release the files by today, December the 19th.

Well, let's have a word with our correspondent, Nedda Tofieke, who's on the line from New York. What have you started to see in the last few minutes, Neda?

Well, just to give, you know, the listeners a sense, the Justice Department website under its Epstein page posted a link. The link, when you click it, puts you in a queue to then have to wait to access the files. Now, it says that in the description that in the view of the congressional deadline, that they were making all

reasonable efforts to review and redact personal information pertaining to victims and other

private individuals from disclosure. And so the notice acknowledges that not everything will be

coming out today, which is bound by law, really.

They are supposed to release everything.

Now, so far, there are numerous pages with numerous PDFs.

I was able to just go through a few pages before I got in, and they are so far all images.

And they appear to all be images from Jeffrey Epstein's New York residence

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