When Congress passed the Epstein Files law, the common and undoubtedly correct assumption was that the Trump DOJ would simply weed out the Trump stuff. And as we’ve seen, they’ve gone to town releasing everything about … say, Bill Clinton but in many cases obviously filtered out Trump stuff. So this basic part of the story is predicted, unsurprising and confirmed. But there’s a more complex if no less corrupt story coming into focus.
A few pretty damaging things have come out. I’m not sure for instance whether that purported jailhouse Epstein letter is real. But it’s pretty clear the White House/DOJ doesn’t have any evidence or hasn’t yet found any evidence that it’s fake. If they did, they’d release it. The best discussion of the authenticity question I’ve seen is this short piece in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. The gist is that, based on what we know in the public record, there’s no clear evidence pointing either to its authenticity or fraudulence. There are a couple potential red flags. But these have relativity straightforward explanations based on how the prison mail system works. They could be evidence of fakery but not necessarily. A handwriting analysis was done and that could at least point in one or the other clear direction. But we haven’t seen that report.
For what it’s worth, my biggest question about that letter isn’t any technical issue. It’s the sheer on-pointness of it. I mean, days before he kills himself Epstein writes a letter to the guy who was at the time perhaps the country’s most notorious pedophile molester, Larry Nassar, and says, “Hey fellow pedophile! I’m here getting ready to kill myself. Isn’t it wild that our fellow member of the pedophile club Donald Trump is getting away with everything?!?!?”
This is what journalists sometimes call “too good to check.” That doesn’t mean it’s not real. The fact that it’s in the files tells me that investigators at a minimum weren’t sure it wasn’t real. Otherwise it wouldn’t be there in the investigative records.
Taken together though I see a different pattern. It’s one thing to say the White House/DOJ will purge the files. Of course they will. Or … of course they’ll try. But we’re talking about a massive, massive volume of documents. And it’s just really, really hard to effectively go through it all. Sure, you can do some string searches. But that’s going to miss stuff, especially things that aren’t easily scannable digital type. You’ll have things that are handwritten. It’s a massive task that requires an army of purgers. How many people do they on the case? And perhaps more specifically and importantly how many people can they deploy who are loyal enough to do the purging job and do it effectively? The answer seems to be, not enough.
So what seems to be happening is, yeah, they’re trying, but stuff is leaking out. If they’d focused on this letter, you either just don’t release it or you run down that handwriting report and be loaded to bear to knock it down upon release. But they don’t seem to have been prepared at all.
You could argue, well, isn’t the point here, Josh, that they’re not trying to protect Trump? They’re just releasing everything like they’re supposed to. But that’s not the case because we’re already finding instances of things that have been deep-sixed. They’re playing all sorts of games. Then there are things like not doing even the most basic kind of blocking and tackling on how to execute proper redactions, as opposed to leaving the underlying redacted text “under” the black marks. That’s a total rookie level mistake. So that’s my take. They don’t have the time, expertise or sufficient number of loyalists to effectively prune the trove of damaging Trump material.
