there are a few messaging conversations between FB agents early on that are kind of interesting. It would be very interesting to see them about the releases. I sometimes wonder if some was malicious compliance... ie, do a shitty job so the info get's out before it get re-redacted... we can hope...
I am in no way a republican apologist, but how many people were clamoring for the immediate releasing these documents, saying it "should be easy" and all that? Laws were passed ordering their sudden speedy disclosure. How would you have handled this?
Every second of my political consciousness in the United States has been acutely tinged with the awareness that a bunch of people, across most of the political spectrum live in a constant state of denial. Denial of personal responsibility or culpability. Denial of cognitive dissonance. Denial of any distinct, self-informed morals. Denial of anything but a fear of others. Denial of anything that makes them fearful or uncomfortable or might invite confrontation.
I've known from the second I started doing debate and FX/DX in highschool, well, let's just say I never thought that the majority of the 2FA-folks would be worth a damn when tyranny really came knocking. Fear of the other as a form of manipulation, and a distraction from class consciousness, has been their literal raison d'état since decades before I was born.
I guess I was shocked that the President being a convicted rapist and documented child predator would be a bridge too far. But then we re-elected him.
I believe it. We voted for this. We do nothing in the face of zero actual justice. This is exactly as good as we deserve. And best of all, it certainly doesn't stop here. This is what they chose to not redact. When we know they spent enormous tax-payer hundreds-of-people hours redacting the documents.
I don't think it's even conspiratorial to say they left stuff in, so they could use it as justification for not releasing the other HALF of the files that haven't been released, even overly censored.
We deserve this, and the much worse that our apathy has invited.
As a non american looking in I feel like that applies to the other side as well and is how you ended up here.
Having paid a bit of attention during the election seeing bernie and trump at least in terms of rethoric more in line with eachother on the same trade agreements, migration, etc whilst also both outperforming Hillary in the same swing states, etc is not some coincidence.
And given that you live in a 2 party state it's always going to swing at some point eventually. No matter how depraved someone like trump is.
If the next one is just as bad and they sit it out long enough they will get their turn.
I will certainly feel less confident ridiculing conspiracy theories.
I’d never believe Bill Gates would secretly slip antibiotics into his wife’s cocktail to treat an STI he got from a Russian prostitute on convicted pedophile estate.
I wish I could believe in more conspiracy theories. At least then I might believe there was some sort of master plan, that some individual or group had some image of a better world (to them) and that the world was being steered somewhere.
Unfortunately no, it just seems to be greed, incompetence, and incompetent greed. At least when a tank drives over a protestor somebody gets to be on the side of the tank. When the bus goes off a cliff because the driver sold the steering wheel everybody dies.
Schizos would be schizos anywhere else. Widely available access to information which are biased towards your own bias mostly did that. Most of the people don't understand technology in general nor the algoritmic content suggestion. That is what the real problem is.
Absolutely. It’s not some grand replacement theory. It’s not an intellectual master plan. It’s mostly plain greed and cynicism from the powerful, plus ignorance or a resigned belief that people cannot be changed from everyone else.
I’m in the second group. When a majority of people miss the basics, when a large chunk treat internet content as daily reality rather than algorithmically served rage bait, it feels like there’s nothing you can do.
A friend once told me, “I wish I were more schizo like before, it was much more fun,” and in a bleak way, I get it. I’d almost prefer it if there really were a coherent plan, some deliberate attempt by the mighty to steer civilization. But right now it mostly looks like greed and cynicism. These days, a lot of it seems to be coming out of Silicon Valley but it will change as it always does like it did before.
Epstein was involved in a UK corruption plot to reduce taxes on banker's bonuses. He was involved with insider trading around 9/11. This net is far reaching.
I wonder if this could be intentional. If the datasets are contaminated with CSAM, anybody with a copy is liable to be arrested for possession.
More likely it's just an oversight, but it could also be CYA for dragging their feet, like "you rushed us, and look at these victims you've retraumatized". There are software solutions to find nudity and they're quite effective.
The emails are bizarrely sloppy with spelling and punctuation, perhaps many usages of "don't" ended up being typed as "don t", triggering an automated find-and-replace.
The export itself is also sloppy, with characters like equal signs being added in weird places. Seems like they have it set to cast a wide and poorly set up net.
The US administration is, at present, regularly violating the law and ignoring court orders. Indeed, these very releases are patently in violation of multiple federal laws -- they're simultaneously insufficiently-responsive to meet the requirements of the law requiring the release of the files and fall afoul of CSAM laws by being incompletely redacted.
The challenge, as we're all experiencing together, is that the law is not inherently self-enforcing.
> ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence," Schiltz said, adding that he counted 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases.
"Allegations" from the exact judges whose orders aren't being enacted? The orders in question are pretty simple: release this guy. Don't take this guy out of state. It's pretty clear when they're not being followed. This guy is not a slouch:
Did you notice that one article I linked involved a DoJ lawyer admitting that she couldn't convince ICE to obey court orders that she was trying to transmit to them? That's beyond an allegation and into admission. How is that not evidence?
The problem is that it's always specific to a particular case. So, if one guy isn't being released according to court order, they could order someone held in the courthouse jail until he is, and probably just the threat will get him released. But then 1) nobody ends up in jail, because they're not in contempt anymore and 2) it doesn't do anything for any other cases, and there are so many other cases. This sort of contempt where a judge can just order it is "civil contempt" and is meant to convince someone to comply with the court order, it can't be used to punish someone longer than that (criminal contempt can, but you need an actual prosecution, trial, etc).
You might think "ok can't they be held in contempt for the pattern of ignoring court orders" and, well, you'd think so. But that looks a lot like a universal injunction or a class action and SCOTUS has deliberately been nerfing those.
If they've simply been committing crimes then judges don't have anything to do- they'd have to be prosecuted by someone, or I guess sued civilly, but that won't put them in jail either and takes forever.
Furthermore, there are numerous allegations that the documents that have been released contain CSAM, which (referencing the PDF above) may fall afoul of 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A.
In addition, one need only glance at the action in US courts to see egregious violations of the Constitution and valid court orders playing out daily.
Yes, the Abrego Garcia and Öztürk detentions are two very newsworthy cases that have actually reached the point of a final judgement in the district courts, as opposed to "merely" preliminary injunctions against the government.
(It's also worth noting that almost none of the government's appeals to their losses in preliminary injunctions have been on the merits as to whether or not their actions were legal, but rather on the grounds of "no one should be allowed to challenge our actions," which has also been a fairly losing argument for everybody except SCOTUS.)
Allegations are literally evidence. "He attacked me" is an allegation of a crime and is evidence that would be used in conjunction with other evidence to prosecute said crime.
They keep illegally appointing unqualified hacks as US attorney in defiance of the mandate they're approved by the Senate (Essayli, Habba, Halligan, Sarcone, Chattah) - judges have found at least five of the appointments illegal. As one example: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/28/judge-los-angeles-t...
They've repeatedly violated court orders to either return immigrant detainees or release them. "This is one of dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks.": https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/patrick-schiltz-judg...
His targeting and shakedowns of Universities, law firms, and media companies is transparently illegal jawboning.
Everything about the tariffs is obviously illegal which he confirms every time he opens his mouth since he's relying on 'national security' justifications to issue them without Congress and he keeps insisting they're punishment for some random perceived slight.
Some sillier things like renaming the Kennedy Center -- the law that established it literally said that it couldn't be renamed without Congress -- so Trump firing everyone on the board and then appointing a bunch of his flunkees to vote for the name change doesn't cut it.. https://beatty.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/beatty.house.gov...
It's a literal onslaught of illegality so I can't tell if you haven't read a news article since 2025 or if you're trolling.
There's more than enough credible reports of CSAM in the Epstein Files dump - more than enough for me to not go and download even a single file of them myself, simply because German law does not care about why you are in the possession of CSAM, even if you took the picture yourself.
The legal situation regarding CSAM is very strict no matter which country, and I better hope no one here will actually be dumb enough to provide actual links.
If those reports are true then what we have is not just an effective deterrent for download and distribution of the set, but legally prosecutable malware targetting anyone who does, empowered by the Interpol CSAM database to which the DOJ should probably already released the offending material.
It's a tricky issue. In many countries it's not illegal and quite common for children to run around naked in public, during the summer on beaches for example, and so millions of people have holiday photos that are technically CSAM in their possession that they don't even know they have.
CSAM has a meaning identical to child porn but doesn't make that meaning explicit. Drawn or generated depictions of child nudity can be considered CSAM in some jurisdictions.
there are a few messaging conversations between FB agents early on that are kind of interesting. It would be very interesting to see them about the releases. I sometimes wonder if some was malicious compliance... ie, do a shitty job so the info get's out before it get re-redacted... we can hope...
I am in no way a republican apologist, but how many people were clamoring for the immediate releasing these documents, saying it "should be easy" and all that? Laws were passed ordering their sudden speedy disclosure. How would you have handled this?
Sudden speedy immediate didn't happen.
If I was Pam? I wouldn't have been.
If she was me, start earlier, hire better, end later.
Released all files as is, no redactions.
I mean, the internet is finding all her mistakes for her. She is actually doing alright with this. Crowdsource everything, fix the mistakes. lol.
This would be funnier if it wasn’t child porn being unredacted by our government
Weren’t. Subjunctive mood.
Language is whatever people think it is, and "it wasn't" has plurality agreement which "it weren't" does not
rubn't. conjunctivitis.
If you think the child porn is the worst part of this mess, I’ve got news for you.
We’d all be lucky if it was just distributing child porn.
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Every second of my political consciousness in the United States has been acutely tinged with the awareness that a bunch of people, across most of the political spectrum live in a constant state of denial. Denial of personal responsibility or culpability. Denial of cognitive dissonance. Denial of any distinct, self-informed morals. Denial of anything but a fear of others. Denial of anything that makes them fearful or uncomfortable or might invite confrontation.
I've known from the second I started doing debate and FX/DX in highschool, well, let's just say I never thought that the majority of the 2FA-folks would be worth a damn when tyranny really came knocking. Fear of the other as a form of manipulation, and a distraction from class consciousness, has been their literal raison d'état since decades before I was born.
I guess I was shocked that the President being a convicted rapist and documented child predator would be a bridge too far. But then we re-elected him.
I believe it. We voted for this. We do nothing in the face of zero actual justice. This is exactly as good as we deserve. And best of all, it certainly doesn't stop here. This is what they chose to not redact. When we know they spent enormous tax-payer hundreds-of-people hours redacting the documents.
I don't think it's even conspiratorial to say they left stuff in, so they could use it as justification for not releasing the other HALF of the files that haven't been released, even overly censored.
We deserve this, and the much worse that our apathy has invited.
>and a distraction from class consciousness
As a non american looking in I feel like that applies to the other side as well and is how you ended up here.
Having paid a bit of attention during the election seeing bernie and trump at least in terms of rethoric more in line with eachother on the same trade agreements, migration, etc whilst also both outperforming Hillary in the same swing states, etc is not some coincidence.
And given that you live in a 2 party state it's always going to swing at some point eventually. No matter how depraved someone like trump is. If the next one is just as bad and they sit it out long enough they will get their turn.
I will certainly feel less confident ridiculing conspiracy theories.
I’d never believe Bill Gates would secretly slip antibiotics into his wife’s cocktail to treat an STI he got from a Russian prostitute on convicted pedophile estate.
But here we are.
I wish I could believe in more conspiracy theories. At least then I might believe there was some sort of master plan, that some individual or group had some image of a better world (to them) and that the world was being steered somewhere.
Unfortunately no, it just seems to be greed, incompetence, and incompetent greed. At least when a tank drives over a protestor somebody gets to be on the side of the tank. When the bus goes off a cliff because the driver sold the steering wheel everybody dies.
The owner of 4chan met with an Epstein associate 3 days before reinstating /pol/ which lead to the destruction of America.
Epstein was trying to remove tax on banker bonuses in the UK for some reason.
There might not be a single master plan but holy hell is this stuff intertwined with everything that happens.
Schizos would be schizos anywhere else. Widely available access to information which are biased towards your own bias mostly did that. Most of the people don't understand technology in general nor the algoritmic content suggestion. That is what the real problem is.
Absolutely. It’s not some grand replacement theory. It’s not an intellectual master plan. It’s mostly plain greed and cynicism from the powerful, plus ignorance or a resigned belief that people cannot be changed from everyone else.
I’m in the second group. When a majority of people miss the basics, when a large chunk treat internet content as daily reality rather than algorithmically served rage bait, it feels like there’s nothing you can do.
A friend once told me, “I wish I were more schizo like before, it was much more fun,” and in a bleak way, I get it. I’d almost prefer it if there really were a coherent plan, some deliberate attempt by the mighty to steer civilization. But right now it mostly looks like greed and cynicism. These days, a lot of it seems to be coming out of Silicon Valley but it will change as it always does like it did before.
>I wish I could believe in more conspiracy theories.
Username checks out... well, I can help ya.
You start out easy, like "who invented all those damn conspiracy theories and introduced them into the public culture, anyway?"
Epstein was involved in a UK corruption plot to reduce taxes on banker's bonuses. He was involved with insider trading around 9/11. This net is far reaching.
[dead]
Become?
> become
the mascot of 4chan was literally pedobear, what time frame are you referring to?
The owner of 4chan met with an Epstein associate 3 days before reinstating /pol/ which lead to the destruction of America.
I wonder if this could be intentional. If the datasets are contaminated with CSAM, anybody with a copy is liable to be arrested for possession.
More likely it's just an oversight, but it could also be CYA for dragging their feet, like "you rushed us, and look at these victims you've retraumatized". There are software solutions to find nudity and they're quite effective.
I'll take Hanlon’s Razor for 500, Alex.
Or it's distraction. Leave nudity in to use up attention that should be turning to analysis of what's been redacted.
There's redaction to protect victims and there's redaction to protect specific co-conspirators in Epstein's spy ring
It's hilariously revealing that it keeps redacting "Don't".
Odd indeed. The President's name contains no apostrophe :)
The emails are bizarrely sloppy with spelling and punctuation, perhaps many usages of "don't" ended up being typed as "don t", triggering an automated find-and-replace.
The export itself is also sloppy, with characters like equal signs being added in weird places. Seems like they have it set to cast a wide and poorly set up net.
the issue is that mistakes can't be fixed in the sense once they are discovered, it doesn't matter if they are eventually redacted
Let's see her sued for leaking PII. Here in Europe, she'd be mincemeat.
The US administration is, at present, regularly violating the law and ignoring court orders. Indeed, these very releases are patently in violation of multiple federal laws -- they're simultaneously insufficiently-responsive to meet the requirements of the law requiring the release of the files and fall afoul of CSAM laws by being incompletely redacted.
The challenge, as we're all experiencing together, is that the law is not inherently self-enforcing.
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How about court orders?
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/ice-violations-judge-...
> ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence," Schiltz said, adding that he counted 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/frustrations-from-judge-prosecu...
[flagged]
"Allegations" from the exact judges whose orders aren't being enacted? The orders in question are pretty simple: release this guy. Don't take this guy out of state. It's pretty clear when they're not being followed. This guy is not a slouch:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/27/patrick-schiltz-jud...
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
Did you notice that one article I linked involved a DoJ lawyer admitting that she couldn't convince ICE to obey court orders that she was trying to transmit to them? That's beyond an allegation and into admission. How is that not evidence?
More on these ignored court orders:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/28/ice-illegally-detai...
A specific case:
https://www.startribune.com/judge-orders-detainee-returned-m...
At this point you're taking a piss, this is not a honest discussion stance.
Judges themselves complained about their own orders being ivolated/ignored. Repeatedly.
> you're taking a piss
"You are taking a piss" -- you are currently urinating.
"You are taking the piss" -- you are mocking me or this.
Thank you. Sadly can't edit it anymore but I'll remember it next time.
If someone violates a court order don’t they get arrested?? Can’t the judge pronounce the perpetrators should be arrested instead of just complaining?
This is exactly the breakdown of the system that people are sounding the alarm about.
The problem is that it's always specific to a particular case. So, if one guy isn't being released according to court order, they could order someone held in the courthouse jail until he is, and probably just the threat will get him released. But then 1) nobody ends up in jail, because they're not in contempt anymore and 2) it doesn't do anything for any other cases, and there are so many other cases. This sort of contempt where a judge can just order it is "civil contempt" and is meant to convince someone to comply with the court order, it can't be used to punish someone longer than that (criminal contempt can, but you need an actual prosecution, trial, etc).
You might think "ok can't they be held in contempt for the pattern of ignoring court orders" and, well, you'd think so. But that looks a lot like a universal injunction or a class action and SCOTUS has deliberately been nerfing those.
If they've simply been committing crimes then judges don't have anything to do- they'd have to be prosecuted by someone, or I guess sued civilly, but that won't put them in jail either and takes forever.
There's no one in 2026 honestly saying "But what crimes has he committed???" its just concern trolls, sealions, bots, and some nazis.
As noted above:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-119publ38/pdf/PLAW-... : the Attorney General was to have produced the entirety of the Epstein files, with very narrowly-enumerated redactions, in December. She has not done so.
Furthermore, there are numerous allegations that the documents that have been released contain CSAM, which (referencing the PDF above) may fall afoul of 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A.
In addition, one need only glance at the action in US courts to see egregious violations of the Constitution and valid court orders playing out daily.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26513988-trorder0128...
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
Allegations aren't evidence. Has the Administration actually been found guilty of violating the law - if that is even possible.
Yes, the Abrego Garcia and Öztürk detentions are two very newsworthy cases that have actually reached the point of a final judgement in the district courts, as opposed to "merely" preliminary injunctions against the government.
(It's also worth noting that almost none of the government's appeals to their losses in preliminary injunctions have been on the merits as to whether or not their actions were legal, but rather on the grounds of "no one should be allowed to challenge our actions," which has also been a fairly losing argument for everybody except SCOTUS.)
> Has the Administration actually been found guilty of violating the law - if that is even possible.
Obviously administrations can violate the law. Otherwise this is just an autocracy with term limits.
>if that is even possible
yes.... any administration can be found guilty of violating law, and should be dealt with accordingly.
>Allegations aren't evidence
Allegations are literally evidence. "He attacked me" is an allegation of a crime and is evidence that would be used in conjunction with other evidence to prosecute said crime.
Evidence is evidence - of which there are enormous amounts of.
Are you expecting the administration to prosecute itself?
That's why there is separation of powers or ought to be.
They illegally fired the IGs responsible for whistleblowers and fraud in every department; https://www.nycbar.org/press-releases/firings-of-inspectors-...
They illegally withheld funds (impoundment) from congressionally authorized/mandated expenditures and relied on pocket rescissions to defund programs they didn't like: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/pocket-rescissi...
They keep illegally appointing unqualified hacks as US attorney in defiance of the mandate they're approved by the Senate (Essayli, Habba, Halligan, Sarcone, Chattah) - judges have found at least five of the appointments illegal. As one example: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/28/judge-los-angeles-t...
They've repeatedly violated court orders to either return immigrant detainees or release them. "This is one of dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks.": https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/patrick-schiltz-judg...
The EPA illegally convened a secret panel of climate deniers to issue a sham report in order to repeal the endangerment finding: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/climate/energy-department...
His targeting and shakedowns of Universities, law firms, and media companies is transparently illegal jawboning.
Everything about the tariffs is obviously illegal which he confirms every time he opens his mouth since he's relying on 'national security' justifications to issue them without Congress and he keeps insisting they're punishment for some random perceived slight.
His illegal firing of Federal workers without the notice required: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/25/nx-s1-5544317/federal-probati...
Some sillier things like renaming the Kennedy Center -- the law that established it literally said that it couldn't be renamed without Congress -- so Trump firing everyone on the board and then appointing a bunch of his flunkees to vote for the name change doesn't cut it.. https://beatty.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/beatty.house.gov...
It's a literal onslaught of illegality so I can't tell if you haven't read a news article since 2025 or if you're trolling.
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How can illegal firings be not illegal?
How can legal firings be illegal?
No way I can see!
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[flagged]
There's more than enough credible reports of CSAM in the Epstein Files dump - more than enough for me to not go and download even a single file of them myself, simply because German law does not care about why you are in the possession of CSAM, even if you took the picture yourself.
The legal situation regarding CSAM is very strict no matter which country, and I better hope no one here will actually be dumb enough to provide actual links.
If those reports are true then what we have is not just an effective deterrent for download and distribution of the set, but legally prosecutable malware targetting anyone who does, empowered by the Interpol CSAM database to which the DOJ should probably already released the offending material.
Use encryption
> even if you took the picture yourself.
I'd hope the punishment is more severe in that case!
It's a tricky issue. In many countries it's not illegal and quite common for children to run around naked in public, during the summer on beaches for example, and so millions of people have holiday photos that are technically CSAM in their possession that they don't even know they have.
CSAM must be for sexual gratification usually. A medical anatomy textbook isn't CSAM.
And now you're in court strenuously arguing that you weren't sexually gratified by the photo of your kid in the tub.
Obviously most people are sensible most of the time but sometimes they are not.
More than that. CSAM is evidence of abuse. Hence the "A".
And nudity is not required.
CSAM has a meaning identical to child porn but doesn't make that meaning explicit. Drawn or generated depictions of child nudity can be considered CSAM in some jurisdictions.
"CSAM isn’t pornography—it’s evidence of criminal exploitation of kids."
That's from RAINN, the US's largest anti-sexual violence organisation.
Yep. Germany is very very strict for example. Even textual descriptions fall under that law.
> I'd hope the punishment is more severe in that case!
I'm talking about kids making photos of themselves. Which has been an issue multiple times in the past.
That might be intentional tbh, to make the database toxic to limit the spread.
Yeah - they'll take these lessons learned for future batches of releases.
Sicko.