Some Epstein File Redactions Are Being Undone
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As the Epstein files begin to shed their redactions, a lively debate erupts over whether the unmasking of previously hidden information is a result of deliberate sabotage or bureaucratic bungling. Some commenters, like nickpinkston, wonder if the unredacted files are a conscious act of resistance, while others, such as cynicalsecurity, caution against romanticizing the notion of minions risking their lives to undermine a dictator. Meanwhile, insiders like Dusseldorf claim that the unredactions are simply a result of hasty redactions by deputized government staff, highlighting the tension between loyalty and competence, as pointed out by brunoqc. The thread is abuzz with speculation and insight, making it a riveting discussion that's as relevant as it is unsettling.
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And yes, I've heard of Hanlon's Razor haha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
The CIA, for example, is entirely above the law.
Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA, unless the CIA is effectively answerable to some other authority despite not being answerable to the law, ans then it is equivalent to a dictatorship by that higher authority.
No it's not. I can commit all manner of illegal acts in my home unnoticed, that doesn't make me a dictator.
Then they got caught hacking congressional computers to delete evidence.
Nothing happened to them.
They are above the law. You are not.
One, source?
Two, this above reproach. Not above the law. They deleted the evidence, they didn't just blow the scandal off. (Historically, our IC was popular. Right now, it's the deep state. You're seeing political appointees at the FBI and CIA exert control.)
Analogies don't work when they aren't analogous.
My point is their actions are committed outside the law. They've just been able to avoid punishment by covering it up. What they are not is above the law, at least not in the long run. (There are absolutely short bouts where the CIA acts above the law overseas, and rare cases where it has done so domestically. But the fact that they're covering it up betrays that they're crafty bastards, not invincible ones.)
Being above the law is necessary but not sufficient to be a dictator.
We also don’t know enough about the internal politics of the CIA to assert much about the head of the CIA.
Anything else could blow the cover for next time.
To be exact, CNN reports that Sep - Dec ~30 boats have been destroyed in ~26 attacks, with at least ~105 deaths in these operations.
Want to see a real dictatorship? Ukraine jailed all opposing politicians during the war with Russia and stopped having elections. Yet, it's still supported by a large percentage of the population in the US.
The last administration not only tried to jail Trump on bogus charges, but any lawyer that supported him (and his supporters were fired from their jobs).
In addition to this, we are now seeing that large counties in states like Georgia violated laws with hundreds and thousands of votes in the 2020 election. These all point to a dictatorship, that we lived through, yet nobody like you is complaining about it on HN.
No, they did not jail "all" of the opposition. Fair elections cannot be held during an invasion, especially at the rate Russia frauds votes and candidates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_Russian_interfe...
Stand in the middle of fifth Avenue and shoot someone :)
Have political enemies executed
Get his face on Mount Rushmore
Disband congress
Disband the Supreme Court
Keep Jimmy Kimmel off air
Get Jon Stuart to shut up
Get James comey indicted
Get a national holiday named after him
Etc.
Even when we focus on things he tried to do, there is a lot he couldn’t. Let alone when you look at things he didn’t try to do.
lots of these are of course also just a distraction to discuss at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner vs you know, other things
You said "anything", in the context of dictatorship. I only used items in this list which IMO you can reasonably say Putin, an actual dictator, can do. Right now. Except the first one! Because that was a joke, a reference to something he himself said he could do.
If you want to change to "anything which has backroom deal importance, not just bread and games for the masses, but the real things, if you know you know", that's a (slightly) different list.
But, it's also a different comment.
I think he could succeed in principle re: Mount Rushmore, to be honest. I think eventually people will cave in and agree to do it, and then they will just pray to cholesterol that they can wait it out.
I believe Trump will manufacture a crisis before he's out of office in a bid to maintain control. I believe he will have learned from Bush Jr. that a simple war isn't good enough, and it needs to be a genuine emergency.
I believe he'll do whatever he can to make that happen. Native born terrorist, or war with a close country, or absolutely over the top financial crash. Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval - he'll just skip the congressional approval part like he already does.
See you in about 2 years.
There is literally no such obscure rule, and a new Congress will be seated two weeks before the 2029 Presidential Inauguration.
Elections, and the compulsory ends of terms, inauguration of new Congresses, etc, happen on schedule without regard to any exceptional cases, including Civil War.
If he can get a majority of the Electoral College for a third term, and a majority in both houses of Congress in 2028, then things get much more complicated.
But there is no other path. Elections matter, and don't let anyone discourage you from believing that they don't matter enough to vote.
Fewer than you would a year or nine ago, certainly, and a lot of people are working very hard on closing the gap.
If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
I love these.
I'm not a 1A guy, I think that for inference people with a history of domestic violence shouldn't be armed, but this statement really damages your credibility. Of course semiautomatic rifles are useful for both hunting and for self defense. They are effective weapons. That's the problem.
Whut? How the fuck did you make that jump?
AR-15 rifles are useless for hunting. They are too small to reliably kill large game (deer) and too large for small game (rabbits). Sure, they're fine for coyotes, but if you're buying an AR-15 to hunt coyotes, then you should just stop.
AR-15s are also useless for self-defense. They are too bulky for indoor use, and the bullets can penetrate multiple walls. A regular semi-auto handgun is far superior if you're looking to protect yourself against domestic violence.
It's useless for hunting, but you identify circumstances it's useful in. You say it's useless for self defense because it's bulky, I've heard a hundred people say it's ideal because it's easier to be proficient with a rifle than with a pistol.
Say whatever you want, but when you make absolute statements like that, it damages your credibility. That's my feedback for you.
Or post a link to a tiresome comment sections where it's been done countless times.
But until 2A is amended there's nothing we can do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
That’s why I love the conversations.
One of my favorite trivia questions is: how long has it been since Congress has had staff scientists?
Probably not. I dont think anything will.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000250...
That sounds reinsuring, but it is completely false. The idea that the pendulum swings is just regression to the mean: sure, after a terrible president, the next one is likely to be less terrible. But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a far-left one. In fact, if you look at History in various countries around the world, this seems very unlikely.
> If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
Don’t count on it. In all likelihood it will regress to the centre. The American culture hasn’t changed that much and American leftists did not suddenly become competent at getting popular support.
Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would? The Cold War may have been a factor.
> Don’t count on it. In all likelihood it will regress to the centre.
The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left. There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.
In western democracies, I can think of a couple. For example, the wave of left-wing intellectualism that was prevalent up until the 1980s got somewhat lost and lost contact with the lower classes, which left an opening for far-right populists.
> The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left.
You’re right. In that frame of reference, it might indeed regress to the far left, but that would still be slightly to the left of Bill Clinton. The US don’t strike me as having a particularly strong left-wing culture and I don’t see it appearing any time soon.
> There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.
I don’t think the word exist, but the concept proved very useful to a lot of dictators.
They will find excuses to reverse. There will be some technicality, made up historical precense or some actually untrue fact about the world that wil totally make the situation different.
Conservative heretage foundation group has outcome in mind ... and "opposition" is not their preffered outcome.
The other day there was news about some ICE members who blew up the door to a family's home in order to detain a man. The man was a citizen. They knew that. They came to intimidate him because a few days earlier he tried filming their cars on a public street. That's just one example but these cases are only becoming more common.
One thing that's clear is that if he tries to overturn an election again, he is way better positioned to succeed this time. ICE is now the 5th most heavily funded military in the world and the whole point of DOGE[0] was to centralize the government and fill only with loyalists.
[0] NYT investigation recently proved there were little savings https://archive.ph/y5guv
Undocumented immigrants can be detained and deported by the U.S. government but they are still legally entitled to due process.
What is happening is aggressive enforcement and detention that can feel like “disappearing,” but it is not the same thing as extrajudicial abduction in the legal sense.
When people use the word "disappeared" they usually mean families temporarily can't find someone after detention, detainees are transferred far aways, no lawyer automatically assigned, communication is difficult, deportation happens very quickly. While this is real harm, it is not the same phenomenon as disappearance under international law.
The U.S. is aggressively detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants under civil law, sometimes with minimal process and poor transparency — but not through secret, extrajudicial disappearances. Due process is thinner than for citizens, enforcement can be opaque and traumatic, but this is not the same as "vanished" outside the legal system.
Wasn't too hard to put together a quick graph of the past decade for the U.S. using the World Press Freedom Index (relative ranking and score) - an annual ranking of 180 countries published by Reporters Without Borders that measures the level of press freedom.
https://imgur.com/a/4liEqqi
The fact is that the US has taken leaps and bounds toward being a dictatorship in the last decade and if we don't stop this trend we will be a dictatorship. The only thing saying "we're not a dictatorship" does to the conversation is minimizes the very real danger we're in. At least saying "we're a dictatorship" communicates the danger and urgency of the situation.
I do agree that a more nuanced conversation would be more honest, but it's quite difficult to foster nuanced conversations, and I don't think your comment is fostering a more nuanced conversation.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Same reason unions always work hardest when fighting on behalf of the worst workers. If you go to bat for a man who can't do better elsewhere he'll go to bat for you in return.
But wait, the situation is more complicated than that you say? Why yes, that's exactly the point. Two of us can play at the stupid smug oversimplification game.
While the effect being described is real to an extent, distilling it to the point you did is useless because there is so much more nuance. Why assume the place was staffed with first rate talent to begin with? And even if there is a lot of first rate talent many will stick around because they don't care who they serve (people not like this don't tend to make careers in government TBH).
At least 317,000 federal workers were let go or left this year.
For context, lawyers deal with this all the time. In discovery, there is an extensive document ("doc") review process to determine if documents are responsive or non-responsive. For example, let's say I subpoenaed all communication between Bob and Alice between 1 Jan 2019 and 1 Jan 2020 in relation to the purchase of ABC Inc as part of litigation. Every email would be reviewed and if it's relevant to the subpoena, it's marked as responsive, given an identifier and handed over to the other side. Non-responsive communication might not be eg attorney-client communications.
It can go further and parts of documents can be viewed as non-responsive and otherwise be blacked out eg the minutes of a meeting that discussed 4 topics and only 1 of them was about the company purchase. That may be commercially sensitive and beyond the scope of the subpoena.
Every such redaction and exclusion has to be logged and a reason given for it being non-responsive where a judge can review that and decide if the reason is good or not, should it ever be an issue. Can lawyers find something damaging and not want to hand it over and just mark it non-responsive? Technically, yes. Kind of. It's a good way to get disbarred or even jailed.
My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts, particularly when the only incentive is keeping their job and the downside is losing their career. It could happen.
What I suspect is happening is all the good lawyers simply aren't engaging in this redaction process because they know better so the DoJ had the wheel out some bad and/or unethical ones who would.
What they're doing is in blatant violation to the law passed last month and good lawyers know it.
There's a lot of this going on at the DoJ currently. Take the recent political prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, etc. No good prosecutor is putting their name to those indictments so the administration was forced to bring in incompetent stooges who would. This included former Trump personal attorneys who got improerly appointed as US Attorneys. This got the Comey indictment thrown out.
The law that Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey co-sponsored was sweeping and clear about what needs to be released. The DoJ is trying to protect both members of the administration and powerful people, some of whom are likely big donors and/or foreign government officials or even heads of state.
That's also why this process is so slow I imagine. There are only so many ethically compromised lackeys they can find.
My guess is that someone suggested to Trump that they could redact most of the bad bits and plausibly deny that they were doing that, and he decided that this was the path of least resistance.
So I don't think there is any chance that he will easily allow any more votes to go the way of putting more pressure. Unless the pressure gets so bad that he has no choice (read: Newsmax and FoxNews both start pressure campaigns).
The GOP are masters of using parliamentary procedure to avoid votes that would pass that they don't want to pass, nominations and bills that they can't defend voting against.
This was a big issue in the Obama era where Mitch McConnell was determined to make Obama a one term president and decided to "obstruct, obstruct, obstruct" on things that historically never been obstructed, or at least not to the degree they were under Obama. For example, judicial appointments would get stuck in committee and never come up for a vote because the vote would pass. The most famous example of this was the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination that was never given a vote for 11 months, which was completely unprecedented.
The GOP has a narrow working majority in the House. The House, unlike the Senate, has the discharge petition process where if a majority of House representatives sign it, it forces a vote. All the Democratic reps signed on so it only took about 4 GOP reps for it to pass.
The lengths Mike Johnson went to to avoid this were unprecedented. 3 Democratic reps have died in office this Congressional session. Texas has consistently delayed a special election to avoid a replacement. Arizona had a special election. A Democrat won and Johnson avoided swearing her in for 7 weeks because she would be the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition.
4 GOP reps signed on and the White House and the Speaker both put incredible pressure on them to change their mind. It was a big part of why Trump fell out with Marjorie Taylor-Greene (she was one of the 4).
Why go to all this effort? Because Epstein was core foundational mythology for MAGA, reps couldn't defend voting against it and everybody knew it.
Johnson then tried to use a procedure to pass a vote called unaminous consent. Basically, rather than go through a roll call of up to 435 members, the House is given the option to object. If anyone does, it forces a vote. Why would he do this? Because there's no voting record for unanimous consent. It gives members cover to say they did or didn't vote for something. A roll call is an official record. Democrats objected and thus we got an official vote with only 1 "no" vote (Rep Clay Higgins).
The SEnate passed it with unanimous consent.
This was a veto proof majority. So if it was so popular, why just not schedule a vote to begin with?
And the obstruction continues. Johnson again put the House in recess 1 day before the 30 day deadline. Coincidence? I think not.
And now we're getting illegal redactions, not meeting the 30 day deadline and a drip feed of document releases because (IMHO) they can't find enough ethically-challenged lackeys to do doc review and redact the names and images of Trump and powerful people, many of whom are likely donors.
Johnson may well lose his position over this. The Attorney General has a non-zero chance of being impeached and removed over it.
There is no putting this genie back in the bottle. It's not going away and at no point was the Trump circle comfortable they could redact their way out of it. They are in full on panic mode right now.
MAGA is a cult and every cult has a mission. MAGA's mission is to uncover the elite pedophile ring. A cult can only be sustained so long as the mission is incomplete. Epstein is core foundational mythology. It's going to be really difficult if not impossible to redirect this.
You'll notice that Mike Johnson once again has put Congress in recess to avoid it taking action, this time a day before the 30 day deadline. The last time was for 7 weeks to try and get Republicans to remove their names from the discharge petition to avoid all this. Republicans know what a core problem this is.
So it's politically damaging with his base for Trump to pardon attorneys involved in obstructing this. But even if he weathers that, it doesn't solve his problem.
For one, any attorneys despite any pardon are subject to disciplinary proceedings (including disbarment) as well as possible state charges.
For another, this stuff is simply going to get out. Where previously a DoJ attorney would be committing career suicide if they got caught leaking things like grand jury testimony and confidential non-prosecution agreements, now they're obligated to. So they're not leakers anymore, they're whistleblowers who are following the law.
Congress will eventually have to come back into session and Pam Bondi may actually face a real risk of impeachment. If that happens, who is going to want this job when the key requirement is being such a loyalist that you have to break the law?
Congress will also seek compliaance from DoJ and hold investigations as well as drip feed their own documents from,say, the House Oversight Committee.
And in the wings we still have Ghislaine Maxwell who is clearly operating under an implicit understanding that she will get a pardon or, more likely, a commutation. Her move to a lower security prison that isn't eligible for her type of offenses was (IMHO) clearly a move to buy her continued silence until it became politically possible to free her. I don't think that's ever going to be possible other than maybe a lame duck pardon when leaving office.
This story is only getting bigger.
> So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts,
Political redaction in this release under the Epstein Transparency Act is an overt, illegal act.
Does that reconfigure your estimation of whether DoJ attorneys that aren't the Trump inner-circle loyalists installed in leadership roles might engage in resistance against (or at least fail to point out methodological flaws in the inplmentation of) it?
I'm leaning towards negligence though.
Two things come to mind:
* Some things Indyke did fall outside the scope of lawyer-client privilege. It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans. He was never interviewed re: Epstein [1]
* He's a very talented lawyer, insofar as a competent lawyer with, at least, extreme discretion, is talented.
[1] https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_doj-f...
Yep. I think this sort of thing is actually their biggest concern with releasing the docs. They can redact or lose documents that say anything directly incriminating about Trump and his associates and dismiss everything Epstein and testimonies from the 2020s say about him as confabulation, but there are other people who might want to take the administration down with them if they get caught or even just get fed up of being doorstepped by the media, and some of them might have receipts.
It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs.
And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.
You can open up any conservative forum/watch any conservative pundit and they are all saying the same thing: “there’s nothing here it doesn’t matter, Trump is just being photographed with women sometimes.”
The reason it won’t go away is because too many of them hung their hats on Epstein conspiracy theories from 2020 to 2024. Now they have the means to be transparent and there’s no good excuse not to since they were all so loudly chest pounding about it, including the vice president himself.
It's clear from early on when they just re-released the same already public docs that the Trump admin thought "Ok, this is over, we can just move on now". But that basically backfired, especially because the expectation from conspiracy theorists was that every single democrat would be implicated. When nothing new came out it drove for more questions and kept this alive as an issue.
Now, I think they are continuing a bungled approach. These partial releases with aggressive redactions are only serving to keep the story alive. Ironically, if they'd complied with the law I could totally see the "this is a nothing burger" defense being something they'd pull off. But now with the seemingly daily revelations of "oh wow, Epstein was friends with famed abuser Nadler! And he said that Trump shared a taste in women!"
These sorts of revelations really mostly only work because they are tied to being "new information just released".
This also puts all conservative media on a backfoot. It's very hard for them to craft any sort of good narrative when every other day we are seeing wild and unexpected things like "Trump may have participated in murdering a baby".
From the Guardian UK https://archive.md/lO08a
> [Indyke] was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate.
So I don't know about "not a Washington person", but clearly connections exist to the current administration.
Careful, this will get you labeled an antisemite
Every slide towards authoritarianism is gradual, there is no announcement.
Please change the title.
You don't need to do some sophisticated thing for it to be considered hacking
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at least a small handful of brain cells to rub together, so I know what the law _should_ say about this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States
Absent that excluding other default protections like copyright, what I do with it should fall under the assumption of "basically anything".
Opening someone else’s laptop and guessing the password would absolutely fall under that definition, but I think it’s very much questionable of poking around a document that you have legitimately obtained would do so.
By serving up the PDF file I am being authorized to receive, view, process, etc etc the entire contents. Not just some limited subset. If I wasn't authorized to receive some portion of the file then that needed to be withheld to begin with.
That's entirely different from gaining unauthorized entry to a system and copying out files that were never publicly available to begin with.
To put it simply, I am not responsible for the other party's incompetence.
> That's entirely different from gaining unauthorized entry to a system and copying out files that were never publicly available to begin with.
That's not the sum total of hacks, if you have publicly accessible password-protected PDF and guess the password as 1234, that's a hack. Copy& paste of black boxes is similarly a hack around content protection
> To put it simply, I am not responsible for the other party's incompetence.
To put it even simpler, this conversation is not about you and your responsibility, but about the different meanings of the word "hack "
Not the layman, at least to the best of my knowledge.
Yes, certain licensed professionals can be subject to legal obligations in very specific situations. But in general, if you screw up and mail something to me (electronic or otherwise) then that is on you. I am not responsible for your actions.
> if you have publicly accessible password-protected PDF and guess the password as 1234, that's a hack
Sure, I'll agree that the software to break the DRM qualifies as a hack (in the technical work sense). It also might (or might not) rise to the level of "lack of legal authorization". I don't think it should, but the state of laws surrounding DRM make it clear that one probably wouldn't go in my favor.
However that isn't what (I understood) us to be talking about - ie legal authorization as it relates to black box redaction and similar fatally flawed approaches that leave the plain text data directly accessible (and thus my access plainly facilitated by the sender, if inadvertently).
> this conversation is not about ...
You are the only one using the term "hack" here. Please note that I had responded to your "limit/lack of authorization" phrasing. Nothing more.
That said, while we're on the topic I'll note the ambiguity of the term "hack" in this context. Illegal access versus clever but otherwise mundane bit of code (no laws violated). You seem to be failing to clearly differentiate.
Are you not aware of content that is criminal to possess? Like CP is the most common example.
> I am not responsible for your actions.
I've already addressed this confusion of yours - this is NOT about your responsibility for someone else's actions, but about your own actions and whether they constitute a "hack".
> You are the only one using the term "hack" here. Please note that I had responded to your "limit/lack of authorization" phrasing. Nothing more.
Please open a dictionary for the word hack to understand this conversation! And note the word "authorization" in the definition.
> However that isn't what (I understood) us to be talking about - ie legal authorization
Understandably you're confused, the legal limit is your own making, authorization is way broader than that.
> I'll note the ambiguity of the term "hack" in this context
Exactly!!! Keep looking into the definition to resolve the ambiguity!
> You seem to be failing to clearly differentiate
No, your differentiation is wrong
Beyond that you're clearly just trolling at this point, going to great lengths to manufacture an argument about a term that I never used to begin with. "Lack of authorization" has a clear legal meaning whereas "hack" does not.
I think this is the greatest proof of the simultaneous validity of two different arguments. Disclaimer, I'm assuming (I think fairly) that you're in good faith.
The funny thing is, to me, the other commenter's arguments are quite clear/obvious to me and make sense. Not that your points are wrong - but... I'm 99% sure the other person isn't trolling in the slightest. Y'all are just talking across each other.
For the 3rd time, this conversation is not about YOU and not about what surprises you!
> "Lack of authorization" has a clear legal meaning whereas "hack" does not.
No, you've made up this limit to some "legal meaning" (also wrong here, large variety there as well but wouldn't want to endulge you further). Again, open up a dictionary on "hack", then follow the definition of "authorization" from there, if you only find "legal" in there, get a better dictionary, journalists / commenters are usually not lawyers, so they wouldn't accept your artificial legal limits on meaning!
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