Even if you want to
Citizen and professional journalists more motivated than Donald Trump lackeys at the Department of Justice continue to uncover disturbing items in Epstein files released to date. Among them, photographs that the DOJ should have been redacted but missed, “including pictures of a young girl kissing Jeffrey Epstein on the cheek and personal data on passports and drivers’ licenses,” CNN found.
Ellie Leonard is one:
The New Jersey mother of four is among hundreds of citizen-journalists, or sleuths, absorbed by the material connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein. She’s determined to learn the stories behind his illicit sex ring and relationships with some of the world’s most powerful people — and publish what she finds on Substack.
[…]
With all that, there’s plenty of room for people like Leonard. She’s been journalism-adjacent for much of her career, running a business that offered transcription services until AI rendered it largely obsolete. She worked briefly in education and wrote about politics and social issues on her Substack, The Panicked Writer.
But after seeing the interest generated when she started looking at Epstein documents a few months ago, she began devoting all of her professional time to it.
[…]
Journalist Wajahat Ali, who runs the Left Hook Substack, said he admires Leonard’s work and often features her on his site. Some of the Epstein citizen journalists gather on livestreams to talk about what they’ve found.
Over the past decade, Ali has watched the growth of a subculture of people obsessed with true crime stories who love to comb through evidence and advance their own theories.
The Epstein files are “the mother lode,” he said. “If you love conspiracy theories, if you love true crime, this is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of true crime. It is the unfortunately sordid gift that will keep on giving.”
These sleuths are Trump’s worst nightmare as well as for the men and women not yet publicly named in connection with Epstein or who had their names “helpfully” redacted by the Trump DOJ. They’ve escaped American justice for crimes committed with Epstein while overseas counterparts to U.S. policing are “eager to examine the American documents as part of criminal investigations into potential wrongdoing,” the New York Times reports:
In Britain, two arrests have taken place, of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, and of Peter Mandelson, a former ambassador to Washington. Both were arrested on suspicion of the same offense: misconduct in public office. It’s a broad, centuries-old common law offense that makes it a crime to act with “wilfull abuse or neglect of the power or responsibilities of the public office.”
“We don’t have those sort of generic, open-ended kinds of crimes in the United States,” said Paul G. Cassell, a professor of law at the University of Utah. For a decade, he represented Virginia Giuffre, who accused Mr. Epstein of trafficking her to his friends, including Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, in the early 2000s.
As in the United States, the Epstein files have forced some firings or resignations outside of the criminal justice system.
In Britain, the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and his communications director, Tim Allan, stepped down amid ongoing questions about how much they were aware of connections between Mr. Epstein and Mr. Mandelson, the man they pushed to be Britain’s ambassador to the United States. Neither Mr. McSweeney nor Mr. Allan has any known ties to Mr. Epstein.
CNN adds:
CNN worked with Visual Layer, an Israeli software company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze massive sets of images, to review 100,000 photos that the DOJ released related to Epstein, the late convicted sex offender who was accused of abusing hundreds of girls. Those images were among millions of pages of documents and videos released by the DOJ.
These previously unreported findings add to a growing list of botched redactions in the DOJ releases. This includes multiple videos showing women’s faces, documents that named a survivor of Epstein’s abuse, footage showing an undercover FBI agent on the job, and at least one court filing in which sensitive material could be unredacted via copy-and-paste.
CNN reached out to the DOJ on Monday about the problematic images that were still viewable on the government site. After CNN’s inquiry, DOJ uploaded new versions of these images with proper redactions, covering up private data and faces of women and minors.
“Our team is working around the clock to address any victim concerns, additional redactions of personally identifiable information, as well as any files that require further redactions under the Act, to include images of a sexual nature,” a DOJ spokesperson told CNN in a statement on Tuesday.
The transparency law that Congress passed last year requiring the files’ release said the DOJ could withhold or redact images depicting child sexual abuse or any materials that would lead to an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” especially for victims.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in January said that his document team had redacted every woman in images except for Ghislaine Maxwell. They undertook “painstaking” efforts redact “personal identifying information” as well as all “victim information.”
Apparently not painstaking enough. What’s helped keep such images hidden in plain sight is a terrible search engine on the government’s site:
CNN used Visual Layer’s technology to find unredacted items that simpler searches on the Justice Department’s database may have missed. The company’s founder, Danny Bickson, said the Justice Department website has a “basic search engine” that can find text in Epstein’s emails and court filings, “but if you need to search for an image or video, it’s impossible.”
So, Bickson imported the full original DOJ dataset onto his platform, and “it was pretty easy to find, in a few minutes, problematic content,” he said.
So while Trump is ordering the U.S. military to throw up a massive Epstein smokescreen in Iran, people obsessed with the obvious coverup are poring over the documents and making connections that redactions fail to hide. And it is not simply pedophile men, but a stable of medical professionals with flexible ethics that Epstein kept on informal “retainer” to ensure his girls were sexually fit. (Follow gift link.) The amateurs will keep digging. They will ensure that this scandal keeps unfolding for years. Trump is almost powerless to stop them. Almost. But more careers will come crashing down. He’ll be fine with that so long as it’s not his.
If it comes down to it, Trump will throw the world under the bus to save himself.