Dem
47
GOP
53
Until now, it was thought that there were maybe 100,000 documents related to Jeffrey Epstein in the government's possession. Yesterday, the DoJ announced that over a million new documents have been discovered. It boggles the mind that there are so many. It also boggles the mind that they "lost track" of them. Maybe they forgot to check the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago.
The DoJ said that due to the large volume, it will take weeks to vet them all. Deputy AG Todd Blanche said that 200 DoJ attorneys are working on the project. Nominally, they are looking to black out the names of Epstein's victims, but if there are entire pages blanked out, as in Tranche 1, many people are going to assume that it is the perpetrators that the DoJ wants to protect. Some of the documents may stem from the 2008 case against Epstein, but 1 million seems like a lot. It is at least possible that large numbers of the documents may have been taken from Epstein's properties but have absolutely nothing to with his crimes (e.g., his mortgage statements, bills for aviation fuel, invoices from his cleaning company, etc.). It has occurred to us that dumping a million documents out there could be a kind of denial-of-service attack, flooding the zone with so much stuff that no team of reporters could possibly have the ability to go through all of them. On the other hand, the Internet is pretty good at this kind of stuff if people could sign up to examine, say, 100, documents. It would need coordination, though.
Unless there is a smoking gun in the files, which is unlikely because the 200 DoJ attorneys will surely make sure any such document never sees the light of day, no matter how many documents are released, some critics are going to say: "How do we know you didn't shred the 20 documents that implicate Trump?"
In fact, the complaints have already started. A group of 19 Epstein victims wrote: "The public received a fraction of the files, and what we received was riddled with abnormal and extreme redactions with no explanation." This is not going to let up. (V)