Some Epstein file redactions are being undone with hacks

> - Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.

What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?

Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.

"There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof."

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-pdf-r...

Given the context and the baldly political direction behind the redactions, it's not at all unlikely that this is the result of deliberate sabotage or malicious compliance. Bondi isn't blacking these things out herself, she's ordering people to do it who aren't true believers. Purges take time (and often blood). She's stuck with the staff trained under previous administrations.

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Black square vs redaction tool difference is well known if someone's job involves redacting PDF or just working with PDF. It's most likely that additional staffs were pulled in and weren't given enough training.

A third possibility is diversion, while the most damaging evidence would be suppressed a different way.

Reporting is that they had a basically impossible deadline and they took lawyers off of counterintelligence work to do this. So a conscious act of resistance is possible, but it's a situation where mistakes are likely - people working very quickly trying to meet a deadline and doing work they aren't that familiar with and don't really want to be doing.

It's a good question.

For context, lawyers deal with this all the time. In discovery, there is an extensive document ("doc") review process to determine if documents are responsive or non-responsive. For example, let's say I subpoenaed all communication between Bob and Alice between 1 Jan 2019 and 1 Jan 2020 in relation to the purchase of ABC Inc as part of litigation. Every email would be reviewed and if it's relevant to the subpoena, it's marked as responsive, given an identifier and handed over to the other side. Non-responsive communication might not be eg attorney-client communications.

It can go further and parts of documents can be viewed as non-responsive and otherwise be blacked out eg the minutes of a meeting that discussed 4 topics and only 1 of them was about the company purchase. That may be commercially sensitive and beyond the scope of the subpoena.

Every such redaction and exclusion has to be logged and a reason given for it being non-responsive where a judge can review that and decide if the reason is good or not, should it ever be an issue. Can lawyers find something damaging and not want to hand it over and just mark it non-responsive? Technically, yes. Kind of. It's a good way to get disbarred or even jailed.

My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.

So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts, particularly when the only incentive is keeping their job and the downside is losing their career. It could happen.

What I suspect is happening is all the good lawyers simply aren't engaging in this redaction process because they know better so the DoJ had the wheel out some bad and/or unethical ones who would.

What they're doing is in blatant violation to the law passed last month and good lawyers know it.

There's a lot of this going on at the DoJ currently. Take the recent political prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, etc. No good prosecutor is putting their name to those indictments so the administration was forced to bring in incompetent stooges who would. This included former Trump personal attorneys who got improerly appointed as US Attorneys. This got the Comey indictment thrown out.

The law that Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey co-sponsored was sweeping and clear about what needs to be released. The DoJ is trying to protect both members of the administration and powerful people, some of whom are likely big donors and/or foreign government officials or even heads of state.

That's also why this process is so slow I imagine. There are only so many ethically compromised lackeys they can find.

Why into Word specifically?

Why reveal the trick before all the papers have been released?

Indyke works for other powerful people, runs in MAGA circles.

Two things come to mind:

* Some things Indyke did fall outside the scope of lawyer-client privilege. It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans. He was never interviewed re: Epstein [1]

* He's a very talented lawyer, insofar as a competent lawyer with, at least, extreme discretion, is talented.

[1] https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_doj-f...

ah, found it - this is from the 'Court Records' part.

https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court Records/Matter of the Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, Deceased, No. ST-21-RV-00005 (V.I. Super. Ct. 2021)/2022.03.17-1 Exhibit 1.pdf

Layers.

PDF is an absurdly complex file format. It's part of the reason there is no single "good" PDF reader, just a lot of mediocre PDF readers that are all terrible in their own way. Which is a topic for another day.

There are several ways to remove data in a PDF:

- Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.

- Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement. The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.

- Then you have the computer illiterate, who think changing the foreground and background color to black is good enough anyway.

I remember reading the recommendation for journalists to redact documents is to black them out in the digital version, print it out, and re-scan it. Anything else has too many potential ways by which it might be possible to smuggle data.

Mistaking redaction tool (replaces data with black square) and black highlighter (adds black square as another layer). If people doing redactions are computer-illiterate, they won't see the difference.

They drew black boxes over the text. The text is still underneath. On OCR'd scanned documents, the text you'd copy is actually stored in metadata and just linked by position to the image.

Anyway, if you click on a "redaction", you're clicking on the box and can't select the text underneath, but if you just highlight the text around it, you can copy all the original text.

It's a bizarre oversight.

Copying and pasting doesn't work. Unless your PDF viewer does OCR. And if the redaction is just a black rectangle overlaid on top, that can still be removed.