alt Hacker NewsRedactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing).
It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs.
And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.
The goal (at least it appears this way to me) is less about having any sort of airtight defense or actually successfully protecting people in the docs so much as giving plausible deniability for the talking heads that support the administration to push as truth. If it’s murky, sloppy, or otherwise unclear, then “no one wins” and “no one is right,” so the event can be easily dismissed.
You can open up any popular conservative forum/watch any mainstream conservative pundit and they are all saying the same thing: “there’s nothing here it doesn’t matter, Trump is just being photographed with women sometimes who cares?” Then some deflection about Bill Clinton, making sure to bring up the hot tub photo.
The reason it hasn’t gone away though, despite this often being a very effective approach, is because too many of them hung their hats on Epstein conspiracy theories from 2020 to 2024. It made a lot of people a lot of money and catapulted more than a handful of political careers. Now they have the means to be transparent and they can’t make an acceptable excuse not to be since they were all so loudly chest pounding about it, including the vice president himself.
I think almost all the discussions about Epstein are incredibly crass and gross. It’s not about the victims or justice, it’s about politics. I think there are obviously legitimate reasons to redact portions because we don’t want to ruin more lives (not that this was a real good faith attempt at that). But there is still a small part of me that can’t help but enjoy watching the Trump administration simmer in the pot they so clearly made for themselves over the last five years.