Two of the House lawmakers who reviewed the files—Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Ro Khanna of California—said the redactions appeared to include one “high up” foreign government official and other prominent individuals whose names and photographs were obscured in the versions previously released to the public.
“There are six men, some of them with their photographs, that have been redacted, and there’s no explanation why those people were redacted,” Massie, a Republican, said after spending roughly two hours reviewing the documents inside a secure reading room at a Department of Justice satellite office.
I hate how the lawmakers in the US still follow the old decorum where they pretend to give administration officials the benefit of the doubt. They pretend the redactions were in good faith, when they supposedly arrived at the justice department already redacted, supposedly for grand jury reasons, even though the bill said the whole documents were to be reviewed and redacted to protect witnesses and ongoing investigations.
We all know these redactions weren’t done in good faith. Why keep the old decorum, the administration isn’t. It just makes it easier for you to fail when you afford them the courtesy that they don’t return.
We need a new bill that gives all the unredacted information to an independent monitor, one that is trustworthy, but whose identities are kept secret even, to redact to protect witnesses. Forget investigations. They only investigations they are doing are to protect the co conspirators of Epstein. Keep the id of the people redacting secret to prevent desperate rich powerful people from threatening them.
The other way is to leak it all, all of it, to multiple news organizations, and let them redact to protect victims. If some, like the New York Times, improperly redacts to protect their favorite rich guys, and Israel and their Israel connections, the other organizations that receive the leaks might not and the NYTimes would be exposed for what they are, less trustworthy than they were, less brave than they were, and in league with fascists in Israel even as they champion a final solution for millions of people.