Many were disappointed — though perhaps not surprised — when the Justice Department’s long-awaited document dump on its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein came heavily redacted.
Or at least, they were supposed to be redacted. As documents continued to be released to the public starting last Friday, some netizens quickly noticed that a lot of the blacked-out text could be recovered with the super elite hacking trick of highlighting the redacted paragraphs and copying them into another document, The Guardian reports. A cybersecurity expert, Chad Loder, also says he was able to uncover even more redacted portions with some more sophisticated “PDF forensics,” including what appears to be a photo of Epstein’s cell door marked off with crime scene tape.
The New York Times reported that none of the failed redactions tell us anything new about president Donald Trump’s deep ties to Epstein, but they do detail how Epstein’s henchmen, Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn, helped him lure in underaged girls to sexually abuse them.
According to the un-redacted filings from a civil case in the Virgin Islands against Indyke and Kahn, “between September 2015 and June 2019, Indyke signed (FAC) for over $400,000 made payable to young female models and actresses, including a former Russian model who received over $380,000 through monthly payments of $8,333 made over a period of more than three and a half years until the middle of 2019.”
Redacted portions also detail how Epstein covered his tracks by paying hush money to witnesses, threatening to harm the victims, and releasing “damaging stories about them to damage their credibility when they tried to go public with their stories of being trafficked and sexually abused.” He also instructed “participant-witnesses to destroy evidence relevant to ongoing court proceedings involving Defendants’ criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct.”
It’s not clear why these portions were — unsuccessfully — redacted. The Epstein Files Transparency Act under which the documents are being released, The Guardian notes, allows the DoJ to “withhold certain information such as the personal information of victims and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation.”
The botched redaction job is a huge embarrassment for the Trump administration, which has come under fire for its hesitancy to release Epstein case files to the public, something that Trump had earlier promised he would do. In February, it tepidly released files that detailed little that wasn’t already publicly known, and sparked outrage in July when the DoJ said it would no longer release additional files to the public. It’s backtracked on that stance, but has aroused suspicion with its efforts to censor some of the new documents. In addition to the redactions, over a dozen photos were removed from the initial release, including a photo of Trump alongside Epstein. The delayed release of the documents also missed a legally-binding deadline set by Congress.
None of this looks good for the president, but no matter. In an official statement posted on X, the DoJ said that anything in the Epstein files that makes Trump look bad are “sensationalist” lies.
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the DoJ statement read. “To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
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