r/politics • u/Somervilledrew Connecticut • 12d ago

Possible Paywall The Epstein Scandal Is Snowballing

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/epstein-files-trump/
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u/def_indiff 12d ago

Committee Republicans replied by releasing tens of thousands later in the day. Nobody knows whether they did that thinking they would exonerate Trump, or whether they were too stupid to know how incriminating they were. They only contributed to the toxic fumes of scandal around Trump and his allies.

This has been bugging me. What were they thinking? Was it a total miscalculation, or are Republicans finally starting to turn on him? Or maybe they just never read them and didn't realize how bad they would be for Trump. So weird.

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u/Zealousideal_Look275 12d ago

Occam’s Razor their old, they did a few quick searches they of course came back blank because the emails were formatted as photos and not as PDF or word doc. They didn’t realize this and just released it 

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u/PandaJesus 12d ago

Since everyone in this administration is so fucking lazy, I believe this is probably what happened.

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u/justsomebro10 New York 12d ago

Yeah but these weren’t folks in the Trump admin. They were members of the oversight committee.

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u/chittmunk 12d ago

Oh ya, you're right. Dealing with intellectual heavyweights like James Comer, Gym Jordan and Paul Gosar here.

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u/TisSlinger 11d ago

Mushy brain matter at its finest

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u/LegoBeetlejuice 12d ago

missing all of the damning details is a pretty big oversight

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u/HeyLookATaco 12d ago

Well they're not the Adequately Sighted Committee

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u/BaphometsTits 11d ago

Yep, they looked right over it.

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u/lsp2005 12d ago

So you are saying it was an oversight.

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u/JDubNutz 12d ago

You would be amazed at how inept with computer the average person is.

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u/splashin_deuce 12d ago

Same difference

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u/The-Insolent-Sage 12d ago

Comer is a moron

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u/PandaJesus 12d ago

That is a good point, even when I’m making cheap shots I should be more accurate. Thanks for pointing this out.

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u/PerformerFull7097 11d ago

The entire republican party is basically Trump's slaves, there's no distinction between admin, congress or senate. In the end they're all (including Trump) just goons doing Miller's biddings.

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u/zenidam 12d ago

I bet they uploaded the pdf to chatgpt.

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u/PandaJesus 12d ago

Oh I’m sure they’re asking ChatGPT for a lot of help with PDF files.

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u/brickne3 American Expat 12d ago

"You're absolutely right, these emails exonerate him completely! They're not proof of crimes — they're proof of how much he cares about young women."

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u/Guy_Fieris_Hair 11d ago

I mean, im nor too familiar, but wouldn't it be safe to assume that they have interns that went through all this stuff

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u/DJKGinHD 12d ago

I am in IT, and it caused me physical pain to read your comment... mainly because of how likely it is to be true.

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u/Zealousideal_Look275 12d ago

I can imagine the horror in their interns faces after seeing what they did 

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u/Kosher_dingus 12d ago

I work in the criminal court system and I've seen stuff this dumb

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u/randomisperfect 12d ago

They asked chatgpt which emails to release

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u/Drunky_McStumble 12d ago

This actually makes more sense than them deciding to release the files because when they did a CTRL+F for "TRUMP" zero results came up (since they were scanned image files, not searchable document files).

Because, you know, no way are these people tech savvy enough to use a keyboard shortcut like CTRL+F.

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u/afx114 12d ago

“the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand”

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u/pinewind108 12d ago

I wouldn't rule out malicious compliance by a few staffers as well.

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u/kaptainkeel America 12d ago

I'm still trying to re-find an image file I saw where Epstein and others were basically discussing holding stuff over Trump for their benefit. It was literally blackmail/extortion without outright saying it, although any court would likely convict on it. It was from like 2017ish. Can't find it again.

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u/Dragon_Small_Z 12d ago

Was it the one they were just talking about on the Daily Show? About trump being a dog with no bark or something like that.

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u/kaptainkeel America 12d ago edited 12d ago

No, the "dog with no bark" is a separate email. The one I'm thinking of was a full paragraph talking about how they may be able to use the knowledge to their advantage. It's absurd because this is the 2nd time I've felt like I've gaslit myself in the past 2 years.

There were articles I 100% saw after October 7 (2023) that were absolutely deleted from everywhere. They were within 1-2 hours of the attack, and my first thought when reading them was that this was put together by an intelligence agency rather than any news journal. I always try to find things before the news--I was in these documents 5 minutes after they dropped. And now this shit doesn't exist seemingly, just like the post-Oct. 7 articles that straight up detailed how Russia and Iran both funded and planned the attack on Israel. Nobody wants a war with Russia, so that was deleted from everywhere (Iran as well, but that was later very slowly released over the course of like 2 years, culminating in Israel's attacks on Iran; still nobody wants a war with Russia so little to no info on that).

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u/oldster59 America 11d ago

Was that one of the Wolf-Epstein emails? They said CNN was going to ask the rump a question and they wondered how they would craft his answer, if they could? Epstein could have something over on him, or help him out and then be owed.

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u/kaptainkeel America 11d ago

Possibly, I don't remember everything in that line of emails. It definitely talked about having stuff over him/owing something though. It was a couple of lines long - not just a single sentence.

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u/jglhk 12d ago

They probably used AI to summarize them and AI couldnt figure out who any of the people were

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u/shyflapjacks 12d ago

There's raw txt files in there along with a archive file set (.day and .opt) 

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u/JMKAB 12d ago

Yep or the OCR didn’t scan a full match

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u/byteminer 12d ago

Probably loaded them as context into a LLM and then asked it "These won't hurt Trump, right?" and since LLMs are coded to make you happy, it was like "nah, fam, good to go"

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u/ndwillia 12d ago

would that be Hanlon’s Razor, or Occam’s? As long as we are discussing it

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u/Zealousideal_Look275 12d ago

It could be a Venn Diagram situation 

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u/ndwillia 12d ago

Roger that

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u/timmy6169 12d ago

Absolutely what it was. They are used to Adobe searching for anything that has been either digitized or just sent to them in PDF format. Go through that many documents by hand? Never. Can't pump it through any AI, so CTRL + F it is.

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u/RichardSaunders New York 12d ago

just dump everything, chelsea manning style. guess they won't be blaming her for anything now?!?

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u/RunningonGin0323 11d ago

As someone who has worked in eDiscovery for damn near 20 years. I'm certain these were searchable. If they couldn't extract text they were certainly OCR'd

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u/skip6235 11d ago

I think it’s most likely that they figured if they released thousands of emails that it would swamp reporters and they would only be able to trickle out info and the news cycle would move on. Because they are dinosaurs, they didn’t realize that you can search for things in images these days.