It’s possible they were protecting their own. You don’t release only the parts that implicate your opponents and leave out the parts that implicate your friends.

I think it’s also possible there wasn’t any smoking gun that directly implicated anybody. Only loose associations to Epstein that we already were aware of.

So if they did release it, Republicans wouldn’t believe anything in it that made them look bad, and Democrats wouldn’t care as they want a real smoking gun before they react. So it wouldn’t help in the election, and the release would have zero impact.

Instead, let the next administration deal with it. With Trump now in charge, it really is a rock and a hard place. If there are “loose associations” that make him or his people look bad, and they are the ones to release it, Republicans would not be able to question its authenticity.

Notice how Trump is now claiming Obama and Biden were manipulating the documents, which is why he won’t release it. This is giving his people a reason to be skeptical even if he does release something that looks bad.

TLDR, either Democrats are implicated and Biden was protecting, or Biden felt it was better to let the next administration deal with it, especially if the next administration was Trump.