Epstein - the saga continues

 

Moved from a federal prison to a minimum-security prison camp.

And, the latest reporting on the release of the files isn't particularly enlightening or encouraging.

Last year, while still on the campaign trail, Trump vowed to “declassify” material in the government’s possession pertaining to Epstein. Before Pam Bondi was nominated as attorney general by Trump, she insisted that the public had a right to know more details about the case. “If people in that report are still fighting to keep their names private,” she said on Fox News last year, “they have no legal basis to do so, unless they’re a child, a victim, or a cooperating defendant.”

  Bloomberg

Which one of those is Trump?

In January, Kash Patel, the FBI director, told a Senate Committee during his confirmation hearing that he’d ensure “the American public knows the full weight of what happened.”

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Then on Feb. 27, during a highly publicized event at the White House, Bondi rolled out what the Justice Department referred to as the “first phase” of the release of the Epstein files.

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It turned out the documents she called declassified, which included pages from Epstein’s infamous “black book,” had been previously released, most recently during the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell four years earlier. (The black book revealed Trump’s name and the names of his wife, Melania, and other family members.)

Trump’s followers were irate. Bondi was angry, too. She fired off a letter to FBI Director Patel demanding to know why the bureau failed to provide her with the thousands of pages of documents related to the Epstein investigation and indictment she requested. She wanted answers from Patel, and accountability.

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What happened next kicked off a new phase in the Epstein saga. [...] Patel directed FBI special agents [...] to search for and review every single Epstein-related document and determine what could be released. That included a mountain of material accumulated by the FBI over nearly two decades [...] It was a herculean task that involved as many as 1,000 FBI agents and other personnel pulling all-nighters while poring through more than 100,000 documents [...]

I wonder what they would have normally been doing. Following domestic terrorists?

Senior officials at the FBI’s Record/Information Dissemination Section, which handles the processing of FOIA requests, pushed back on the directives. Michael Seidel, the section chief of RIDS who worked at the FBI for about 14 years, was quite vocal [...] Patel blamed him for the failure to send all of the Epstein files to Bondi. Then, a couple of months ago, Seidel was told he could either retire or be fired, according to the people. He chose the former and quietly left the FBI, the people said.

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In the FOIA, Congress established nine exemptions as a way to balance the public’s right to know against the government’s need to protect sensitive interests, such as national security, official deliberations, ongoing law enforcement proceedings or privacy. When such competing interests arise in non-FOIA matters, those exemptions are often applied even if the exact language set forth in the FOIA statute doesn’t appear in the final record.

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While reviewing the Epstein files, FBI personnel identified numerous references to Trump in the documents [...] Dozens of other high-profile public figures also appeared.

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In preparation for potential public release, the documents then went to a unit of FOIA officers who applied redactions in accordance with the nine exemptions. The people familiar with the matter said that Trump’s name, along with other high-profile individuals, was blacked out because he was a private citizen when the federal investigation of Epstein was launched in 2006.

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[I]t’s common practice for government agencies to redact names on privacy grounds, even when they’re clearly public figures like Trump.

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It’s a really high bar to overcome. The privacy exemptions were designed to prevent the government from releasing personal information on individuals just because it wants to. Of course, the government does break the law sometimes.

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Trump's name in the Epstein files is likely to remain under wraps. Disclosing Trump’s name [...] would neither shed light on how the FBI conducted its investigation into Epstein, nor that the FBI engaged in illegal activity.

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That brings us up to today. After the FBI redacted the Epstein files, they were sent to Bondi. (Media reports said Bondi briefed Trump at the White House in May and told him he was named in the files.) Then, on July 8, the Justice Department and FBI released an unsigned joint statement that said the FBI collected more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence related to the Epstein investigation.

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“While we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein,” the statement read, “it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

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Here’s the bottom line: The FBI's behind-the-scenes decision-making suggests that the chances of aliens resurrecting JFK are greater than Trump’s name ever being unredacted from the Epstein files.