THE EPSTIEN FILES CANNOT BE SANITIZED

 Duncan Lewis

Criminal defense lawyer here. I've worked in white an blue collar crimes. Worked in law firms with worldwide offices and worked as a solo practitioner. Worked financial institution cases involving DOJ and SEC. Worked cartel & sting cases involving DHS, including FBI, DEA, US Marshals Service.

What we call the Epstein Files is a USDOJ file encompassing a years long criminal investigation into sex crimes, money laundering, bribery, likely extortionnd blackmail. This is not a file folder that can sit on a desk. It is probably larger than I am imagining, but given the scope and age of the case, the Epstein Files are millions of files. Law enforcement narratives, Transcripts of interviews. Supplemental law enforcement reports. Bank records. Electronic audit trails. Payment instruction records. Transaction confirmation receipts. Logs of electronic funds transfers. SWITFMessages for international wire transfers. Internal audit logs & system records, BSA reports, Suspicious activity reports.

And what we can call digital media: Thousands of photographs, both those confiscated and those taken by law enforcement. Digital or digitized video, likely thousands of hours, confiscated and taken by law enforcement.

And emails, oh, the emails. I can tell you that successful people in major financial institutions that KNOW they are being monitored by the DOJ and SEC will email ridiculously incriminating things.

Imagine 1 email. It was sent because of a wire transfer to an offshore account to an American politician or involved a billionaire.
One high level officer in a financial institution either sees or is involved in this transfer. He sends an email to 3 subordinates with some instructions and 3 attachments. There are specific instructions on how to name the attachments when downloaded.

Let's narrow our focus to 1 of those 3 recipients. She forwards the email to the 30 people in her department. But only one of the three attachments is relevant to her people. So she deletes 2 attachments but adds 2 of her own attachments.

But - and this sort of thing happens all the time, she FORGETS to delete the instructions for naming the attachments in the original email. So her 30 people download the three attachments and give two of them incorrect names.

Now discussion and coordination begin within those 30 people. The supervisor of those 30 again forwards the
email. But, the thread is getting too long, so he scrolls up, deletes the original email from the original sender, and then changes the subject in the subject line of his email. This is important, because then, those 30 might use that email to keep a thread going about that transaction for months. That email will appear eventually to be completely disconnected from that first email from 1 person to 3. But it will still be about same transfer and it will share METADA with that first email. The attachments will have been downloaded to hard drives, detached drives, they will have been printed out, someone makes notes on it by hand, it is then rescanned into PDF form and saved. The original attachments could have been PDFs, JPG or JPEG, DOCX, ODT, TXT. formats. Maybe a few TIFFs. Voice recordings. Video clips. All from that one original email.

And about emails? JFC people send them all day. People, you don't need to commit your every thought to a damn on't need to know about your argument with your wife about what you had left out in the bedroom when the cleaning service came.

Often, the same people and topics arise in thousands of different email threads. The context makes it obvious. You could try to delete a name in all the millions of documents and would still be obvious who it was.

So as a criminal case, the Epstein Files, if resulting in criminal charges, wouldn't be a paper file. This is where we encounter the relatively modern concept of e-discovery in the legal world.
Both the provider of discovery and the receiver use complex algorithms to scan, organize and sort these millions of files.

Hundreds of humans would take years to do this initial sorting. Duplicates are determined. Near duplicates. Shared metadata. Shared subject lines in emails. But think about that one email I described above. Are those near-duplicates?

The algorithm will encounter emails with no people in common, different subject lines and attachments but some shared metadata.
Now assume that that same person who sent that email also over the years sent 500 emails regarding similar transactions and the same evolution of that thread happens. He might even take his favorite initial email, that he thought was well written, and just use it over and over again for unrelated transactions. Same subject line, shared metadata , But unrelated. All of these emails might contain the names of congresspeople, billionaires, foreign nationals. Blackmail video tapes that were seized might corroborate someone's presence at a particular place when an email was sent that didn't identify who it was talking about. There might be 500 pages of FBI forensic analysis discussing how that email and someone's movements establish the sender of the email and who it was talking about.

You think they're just going to erase Republican names? Good luck with that. I sort of hope they do. That kind of thing ALWAYS backfires and redactions usually call MORE attention to what was there, and speculation is often worse than what was redacted.

When you're dealing with just thousands of documents, much less 10s of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of documents it is not possible to "sanitize" them.

Oh I almost forgot spelling. You think the professional and legal world is full of careful (writers) and good spellers? Think again. You'd be shocked at how bad many of them are, especially when they are pecking them out on their phones, which is much of the time. This can make things complicated for the search algorithms.
And names, especially foreign or slightly uncommon names?

People misspell names so badly that even "sounds like" or "similar characteristics" coding instructions in the scanning software will miss them, over and over again.

Finally, this administration has shown no sophistication whatsoever in its use of technology, secrecy etc. Top secret battle plans disclosed by messaging chats. Remember the notebook full of blank documents from last time?

Also, redacting documents is often legal and necessary. But using the technology, you must give specific instructions and explain why. The companies that create and market this technology are not interested in being part of criminal schemes. And no, you can't just get in there and alter the code because this software exists simultaneously with the user and the software company, operating in real time. The software company keeps logs of every keystroke. I know this. I've retained experts to obtain the logs of a company that operates many of the programs like this operating in law enforcement.

Even when you legally redact a document, there are other versions of it in places you don't know about. Hard drives. External drives. The home laptop of that agent who checked his email from home that one time. Also, people break protocols for limiting document sharing and saving ALL THE TIME.
Some very sensitive documents can be transmitted from A to B with strict instructions on how to download and save them securely and make sure there is only one copy. Then when discovery time comes and the contents of their whole server is dumped, there are 30 copies of it.

The bottom line is that whatever clumsy efforts these clowns make to "sanitize" the Epstein files will not only not work, but will backfire spectacularly. That's why a part of me almost hopes they try it.
Again, no, there is no secret technology or AI way to go in and do what you're imagining. If they present any single document as some kind of proof that some Republican is not involved, I guarantee you the authentic version of that document will surface. And soon.

Finally, the child rape stuff will be worse than you're imagining by orders of magnitude. You'll never see it and be thankful for that. I've had to view some. I had to go meet with a detective on a case involving illegal imagery involving children and a client that demanded I verify that they had it, instead of relying on descriptions. I was 58 years old. And after flipping the pages twice, I closed the notebook and burst into tears in front of the detective. I cried off an on all day. I had to pull over on the way back to the office . And that was the bottom shelf garbage that pedophiles into child porn download via peer-to-peer technology from the dark web.

I don't want to imagine what a bunch of extremely rich, privileged, entitled pedophiles were doing on an island full of children and cameras. THERE IS NO BOTTOM. Seeing what I know they did would not just shock or upset you. It would change you as a human being.

I can't see what I saw that day in my memory. I remember being there and opening it. But nothing more. My mind knows I wouldn't be able to function if some sort of PTSD threw those images up now and then. They're gone. But it changed me in a dark way, giving me the knowledge that such unspeakable things are done to 10 year olds, 4 year olds, BABIES. That they had to endure this and that there are adults that will not only tolerate this but get off on it, set it up, film it and put it out there.

It is almost as thought it cannot be, and yet it is. That's why you saw people, even Nancy Mace walking out of that private meeting with Bondi about those files. It doesn't matter who you are. If you're not a pedophile, you won't be able to control your emotions of facial expressions after you realize what you've just seen.

Anyway, these files won't be sanitized. Eventually, the truth will come out. When it seems imminent, watch for suicides around the world. Not kidding. Ask any criminal defense attorney who's done sex defense

All had clients blow their heads off. That's why things feel different now. Pedophilia is different from anything else. It has a taint and horror like nothing else. Convicted murders and mobsters regard pedophiles as the "real criminals" so there are separate facilities.