Jeffrey Epstein’s victims began the day believing they might finally get something they’d been requesting for years: a direct conversation with the nation’s top law-enforcement official before the Justice Department made public a full trove of long-buried documents and photos. The release of the Epstein files, as the department’s hundreds of thousands of investigative materials have come to be known, might finally provide clarity on what the government knew about Epstein’s sex-trafficking scheme and when it knew it. The victims sat by their phones waiting anxiously—but also, they told me,…