Okay, I laughed.
Planting fake evidence in a homicide investigation doesn’t seem like the kind of thing one does for shits and giggles.
OK so y’see, that if anything is something that helps Trump supporters precisely because it’s SO over-the-top, so Satanic-panic McMartinesque, as Odesio puts it. It will just be used to damage the credibility of other accusations.
One of his clients was Victoria’s Secret CEO, Les Wexner. IIRC from the documentary I watched a while back, he used that position to sleep with young/new models in exchange for furthering their career. He didn’t work for Victoria’s Secret, specifically, but they didn’t know that.
I don’t doubt Trump is enough of a scumbag to be indifferent to, or even party to, such a thing. But I don’t see him being present at such a thing.
This person claims the incident happened in 1984, which is before Trump and Epstein even met, so this particular claim can likely be set aside as the ravings of a lunatic. There was a woman in Florida who sued Trump earlier this month with some similar far-fetched stories about Trump gang-stalking her and stealing her inventions and something to do with 9/11 happening on her daughter’s birthday because of Trump. This feels similar to that.
Of all the blindingly insane things that I have seen people do, and heard people say this year, on camera, in public, and sometimes at a podium in front of millions, I would not put it past some additional moron to do some unthinkingly dumb thing like that.
Interesting news:
I’ve generally presumed that, over the course of Trump’s two terms, he’s had trusted people going through and sorting, appraising, destroying, and hiding materials.
But, likewise, I had some hope that someone would keep a reserve for the day that Congress demanded a blitz release.
Good job, mystery FBI person!
It would appear that the SDMB’s collective belief in the competence of Trump’s DOJ at going through and reacting the Epstein files before they could be released was ill-placed.
Who appears in the new document dump as one of the ten co-conspirators.
Wexner’s protege Mike Jeffries is essentially the Jeffery Epstein of (very) young men. Les keeps interesting company.
If I calculate correctly, one million pages would be a stack the height of 30 story building.
But what they supposedly just found isn’t one million pages, but one million documents. Am I correct in guessing that lots of the documents are dozens of pages long? Are we perhaps talking about the equivalent of an Empire State Building height pile of paper?
1000000 / 200 = 5000 remaining documents per team member.
If it takes an hour to do each document, this implies a couple years. And an hour sounds too quick to me.
Consider that if you are at all serious about keeping out the names of victims, someone has to double-check the work of each redactor. Plus there have to be managers to, among other things, deal with the incompetents. I know there are incompetents because the best employees are pulling in favors to avoid having to do such mind-numbing work. That what I would do if given such a job.
The fact of us being able to undo lots of redactions is proof of incompetence. Maybe they learned their lesson there. But the redactions on the first 750,000 failed at the basic task of blacking out victim names.
If we take this out of the context of Trumpism, I’d say the redaction process needs to slow down. Even if Harris was president, one year for redactions would be unrealistic.
We’d be lucky if it was single-checked. Based on some of the mistakes I’ve seen, they’ve been using AI to do redactions - one memo, for example, redacted the name of the sender, but not the title “US Attorney, Southern District of New York” immediately after it.
There may be millions of documents overall. Redacting and releasing all of those may, to be sure, a Herculean task even when managed by competent leaders.
But that’s not what I was talking about.
Among all the documents about all the different aspects of Epstein’s life, I’d expect that a lot of them are about his financial situation, tedious conversations about real estate transactions, emails that have him flirting with people, etc.
But how much - particularly if Trump was never a subject of investigation - of that is liable to actually even mention the current President? And of that percentage, what smaller percentage is actually damning in some clear and obvious manner?
It may be that the size of Donald Trump’s crimes and complicity grow and shrink exponentially when you add or remove a single document from the whole collection.
Processing millions of documents for public consumption is a large task. Throwing a single paper into the fireplace is but a moment of work.
Knowing that there may have been a hidden set of copies is encouraging.
Prisoners write to other prisoners without having previously known each other all the time. Prison is boring.
Nasser was infamous for the same thing Epstein was infamous for----abusing minor females. The idea that one might be intrigued by the other and interested in reaching out isn’t far-fetched at all.
The mass media has the memory of a gnat. Last week, the number of Epstein files was 5.2 million:
Now it’s suddenly down to 2 million, and no one seems to have noticed enough to call it out:
The set of [files being reviewed] doesn’t seem to be the same as the set of [files to be released]. Plus these don’t seem to be firm numbers – the 5.2 million figure was described as an estimate, and presumably includes some material on the fringe of “needs to be released”/“need not be released”.
In theory, it’s reasonable, yes. But that’s a theory, not a fact.
For the news to not comment on it, not question it, etc. is just laziness.
Yes, they’d be more worthy of respect if they’d break down the numbers (‘files being reviews’ versus ‘files to be released’ etc.).
As it stands they seem to be merely throwing out large numbers. It’s tough to see that as reliable information.
Though, one should note that “files to be reviewed” and “files to be released” should be the same number, except maybe for deduplication.